


Flashback

by ellijay



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 16:23:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 40,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8540095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellijay/pseuds/ellijay
Summary: Daniel wakes up alone in the SGC infirmary and finds the facility deserted, but that’s just the start of a very strange chain of events that will eventually result in the trade-off of one life for another. Set at the end of the second season, prior to “Out of Mind.”





	1. The Ticking of the Clock

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old story, written back when SG-1 was new and shiny. I’m reposting it now mainly to have all of my fic in one place, but also in the hopes that it finds new readers or maybe makes its way back to previous readers who might want to reminisce. This story was originally published under another name, but I’m still me, many years of life experience notwithstanding, and the title and contents of the story are the same.
> 
> (Original Author’s Notes: This story was sparked by Madalyn Wolf’s challenge to write a story where Daniel wakes up in the infirmary at the SGC totally alone and finds the facility deserted. I ended up using that event as just one scene in the story instead of the central focus, but it was Madalyn’s idea that pointed me down an incredibly convoluted path. Credit where credit’s due to Scribe for initially bringing up an idea about a certain Stargate episode that put a twist on the end of this story. Kudos to OzK for creating a fully fleshed-out, living and breathing Janet Fraiser in her “Medical Considerations” series – Janet as she appears in this story was influenced more than just a little by that portrayal. And last, but definitely far from least, special thanks to Imagry, Rheanna, Jb, OzK and Scribe for their support and encouragement through draft upon draft and for the critiques and suggestions that helped me to pick through the minefield and untangle the knots. Now, would someone please pass the aspirin? Jumbo-sized bottle, please.)

His arm was numb.  Damn.  He must’ve fallen asleep at his desk.  Again.  What was it he’d been working on?  Translations?  Artifact cataloguing?

Daniel flexed his fingers, waiting for the pin-prickle sensation of circulation returning.  It didn’t come.  And he was lying on his back, so unless he’d managed to fall off the chair and onto the floor without waking himself up…

Then he noticed the smell – that unique mixture of alcohol and medication and something else he could never quite put his finger on – and the cold, stale feel of the air.  Somehow, the infirmary always seemed a few degrees cooler than the rest of the base.

He groaned, half out of frustration and annoyance, half because of the twisted knot of pain at the back of his head.  So which was it this time?  Arm or head?  Probably both, knowing his luck.  Oh, yeah.  Now he remembered.  It _was_ both.  A big surge of something like electricity through his arm, then his head slamming against the wall when the jolt kicked him backwards.  On P4J549.

He carefully slitted an eye open, then squeezed it shut again.  Yep.  The infirmary ceiling.

“So, how long have I been out?”  No one answered.  Strange.  There was always someone here.

He opened both eyes and carefully raised himself up on the elbow that wasn’t numb, then dragged his other arm across his body.  There didn’t seem to be anything outwardly wrong with it – no cuts, bruises, burns, gunshot wounds.  Didn’t feel like broken bones, either.  He tried wiggling his fingers again and was relieved to see them moving slightly, although there was very little sensation.

As he tried sitting up a little further, the ache in his head grew from a dull throb to a full-fledged pounding of kettledrums.  He blinked hard, slowly dangling his legs off the edge of the gurney.  Somehow, sitting up all the way made the pounding recede a little, enough that he could focus on his surroundings.

“Hello?  Anybody home?”  Still no answer.  And there was a certain quality of stillness to the air.  Noises that were normally lost below the everyday rustle of activity came sharply and clearly to his ears – the steady flow of air in the circulation system, the pinging of steam running through pipes, the hum of electricity in the lighting fixtures.  Apart from his own breathing, there were no human sounds at all.

And adding to the general strangeness – his jacket was missing, and so were his boots and socks, but he was still wearing his pants and t-shirt.  Sort of.  There was a slash running several inches up the shirt from the bottom hem, as if someone had stopped in the process of cutting it off.  There was no sign of that someone, though, no sign of the missing articles of his clothing, and no sign of any medical equipment or supplies of any kind anywhere near the gurney.

More annoying than strange, there was a small puncture on the inside of his arm and a fresh trickle of blood, like someone had inserted and then removed an IV.  He pulled his arm across his leg, wiping it off on his pants.

It was as if everyone had just stopped right in the middle of treating him, gathered up their equipment and walked off.  But that was totally and utterly crazy.  What the hell was going on here?

He eased himself out of bed and quickly looked around for his glasses.  No luck.  No one came to scold him for getting up, either.  Yep, he was definitely very, very alone.  Every other time he had so much as twitched towards the edge of the bed without permission, someone had appeared to give him a stern look.  He swore the doctors and nurses were all mind-readers and just liked to provoke their patients by asking them all kinds of questions.

Just to make sure, he made a cursory check of the adjacent offices.  The only discovery he made was that the concrete floors in here were very cold.  As if he didn’t feel lousy enough already.  Couldn’t they have left his socks on, just this once?  He shivered and tried to wrap his arms around himself, but only one responded.  The other just hung there.  Great.

Where the hell is everybody?  _Okay, Daniel.  Get a hold on yourself.  One thing at a time.  Feet first.  Yeah, you’re always jumping into things, so that’s appropriate.  Maybe there’s a spare pair of slippers in the supply room._

He shuffled over and pushed the half-ajar door open with his fingertips.  The light was on, but nothing – absolutely nothing – was home.  The shelves were bare.  So they took the supplies but left him.  Oh, just dandy.

That thought led to a renewed pounding in his head, which in turn caused him to glance longingly at the empty shelves.  Oh, wait.  The shelves weren’t completely bare.  There was something still in one of the bins.  Yes!  Aspirin.  Such a lovely little miracle.  Two entire packets.  He grabbed both, tore them open and gagged all four tablets down dry.  Ack.  Baaad idea.  Water fountain, in the hall.

As he headed back out into the infirmary, he glanced at the clock.  Wait a minute.  That couldn’t be right.  Just before eight in the morning.  But they hadn’t even left on their mission until nine.  Had he been unconscious for an entire day?

He forgot about the water fountain and made his way back to Doctor Fraiser’s office, quickly locating her desk calendar.  That couldn’t be right either.  The calendar showed Friday the 25th of June.  “Cassie – Pizza Night” was hastily scrawled at an angle across the lines below the date.

The mission had been on Monday the 21st, but he couldn’t remember anything from that day up until now.  They wouldn’t have just left him here for four days – would they?  Unless… something… had happened.  To him?  To them?  Maybe both?  Around here, just about anything was possible – and not always explainable, either logically or otherwise.  He wasn’t going to find answers of any variety standing here staring at a calendar, though.

He was heading back across the infirmary yet again when he finally noticed it.  Amazing that he hadn’t tripped over it when he got out of bed.  As Jack would say, if it was a snake-head, it would’ve blasted him.

It was tucked up against the wall right next to the gurney, sleek and silver and shining dully, disturbingly similar to the artifact that had knocked him across the room back on 549.  The shape was slightly different, more of a truncated cone, and a plate was pried off the side, exposing wires and faintly glowing silver circuitry.  A pair of wires trailed out of the opening and down to the floor.  They were attached to a piece of equipment that was even more disturbingly familiar – a trigger device with a timer.  The timer was ticking.  Less than three minutes left.

Shit.  He couldn’t move.  Couldn’t yell.  He had the absurd urge to laugh, but could only manage to blink his eyes rapidly, quicker than the countdown of seconds.  Five seconds ticked away.  Ten.  Two more and he was sprinting out into the corridor, slapping the alarm button as he went.  Red lights flashed and the siren whooped its warning.

He darted down the hall, ducking his head into offices and storage rooms as he went.  No point.  No one here.  Nobody to help, and _he_ already knew there was trouble.  Very big trouble.  He rounded the corner and narrowly avoided slamming numb shoulder first into a sealed blast door.

It was all like a very bad dream, a sort of twisted, bizarre reflection of reality through a shattered mirror.  It was absurd and decidedly not funny all at the same time.  Somebody stop the world.  He wanted to get off.  _Now_.

Screw it.  He had to do something, and fast.  He could try calling for help on one of the phones in the offices, but if they knew what to do, they would have done it already.  No time for anyone to get back down here, either.  He could try taking cover in one of the offices or down here by the blast door and hope it wasn’t a very big bomb.  It was small enough size-wise, but what the hell did he know about explosive yields, especially if the device was alien?

That left one choice, and it was completely insane.  He could go back and try to defuse it.  His knowledge of explosives didn’t go very far beyond setting them up for detonation, plus he only had one functioning hand to do the job – but there were only two wires connected to the timer.  He had a 50-50 chance of picking the right one to cut.  It seemed to be better odds than any of his other options.

He pelted back down the corridor, ignoring the fact that his head now felt like it was going to explode on its own at any minute.  He could worry about that later – or not, depending on how his luck was running today.  He grabbed the doorframe and whipped into the infirmary.

Three seconds.

_Shit.  Too late.  No!_

Two.  One.

_Oh, God._

Zero.

* * * * *

_Four days earlier…_

“For crying out loud, Daniel.  Do you always have to touch everything?  I swear, you’re worse than a kid in a china shop.”

“I believe the correct expression is ‘a bull in a china shop,’ O’Neill.  Or perhaps you meant ‘a kid in a candy shop’?”

“Yeah, Teal’c, that too.  Daniel, are you okay?”

He took a moment to take stock before answering.  The artifact was still sitting there on the worktable among piles of wires and circuits and metal shavings.  It looked harmless enough – just a smooth cylinder of polished metal, approximately half a meter tall and half again as wide, completely unadorned.  It packed a hell of a punch, though, enough to hurl him backwards and slam him into the wall.  “Other than my arm being numb, yeah, I’m fine.  Give me a hand, will ya?”

Much to Daniel’s chagrin, Jack stepped back and started applauding, slowly and very loudly.  Yep, Jack was annoyed at him, but also relieved or he wouldn’t be so proudly displaying his prominent sarcastic side.  What a smartass.

Sam shook her head and grimaced at Jack, then held a hand out to Daniel, pulling him to his feet without saying a word.  She took a cursory look at his hand, pushing the sleeve of his jacket up to get a better look at his forearm.  “No signs of trauma.  You said it’s numb?”

He nodded.  It pretty much felt like a hunk of dead meat from the elbow down, but he pushed that disturbing comparison aside.  “Felt like an electrical shock of some kind.”

Teal’c turned toward the table holding the offending device.  Sam glanced up from Daniel’s arm and frowned at the artifact.  Jack, though, was having none of it.  “Okay, girls and boys.  We can play Mr. Wizard later.  Let’s get back to the ‘Gate and get Daniel checked out.  Then you can come back and take another look at the… whatever it is.”

Daniel nodded, more than willing to set curiosity aside for the moment.  He felt… very strange.

All of a sudden, the room tilted and slipped sideways.  Or maybe it was him that tilted and slipped sideways.  His vision blurred and translucent specks swirled in front of his eyes.  Like foam on waves.  Crashing on the shore.  He could hear the waves, but from a distance, the sound of air rushing through a seashell.  He had the sensation of falling, rushing down and out the end of a dream, but just before hitting bottom, he was jerked back.  He was being toted to the ‘Gate, slung between two warm, steady bodies – Jack and Teal’c?

There was a rolling, twisting, turning, somersaulting ride through the wormhole, even more disorienting than usual, streaks of light screaming across his field of vision and swirling together in a reckless whirlpool of celestial bodies.  They stumbled into the ‘Gate Room with the very familiar sound of boots on metal, then his awareness broke apart into disjointed bits – voices issuing orders and demanding explanations, the metal wheels of a gurney clacking down a concrete hallway, fluorescent lights flashing past overhead, faces pinched with concentration and concern bobbing in and out of his field of vision, an annoying tugging at his feet followed by cold air on bare skin, a shiver rippling up his back and down one arm – maybe both arms, but he still couldn’t feel the other one – then… nothing.

* * * * *

“Damn, damn, damn.”  Jack was making a good start on wearing a hole in the floor.  Sam wished she could vent like that, but she hadn’t gotten where she was by crying over spilt milk – or spilt guts, for that matter.  Why couldn’t it be something as simple as spilt guts, just this once?  Why did it always have to be something unknown, alien, something they’d never seen or even heard of before?  Holes could be sewn up, guts could be stuffed back in, bullets could be removed.  What did you do when you were faced with something that you didn’t understand in the slightest?  You went crazy, you guessed, you got desperate.  All things she hated, but sometimes you had no choice.

She had a haphazard knowledge of trauma procedures, most of that gathered the hard way, but she still didn’t understand half the things that were being said, asked, repeated, whispered, half-shouted among the various personnel clustered around Daniel.  One thing was clear, though.  The underlying tension and the harried, worried, confused, confounded looks on the faces of the medical team added up to a Very Bad Thing.  The medical terminology was flying over her head like stray bullets, and all she wanted to do was duck and cover her head.  But it was like driving past a car wreck.  She had to look, even if she thought she was going to see something horrible.

She centered her attention on Janet, the focal point of the chaos.  Everyone else was looking to her, so Sam anchored herself on the sound of her voice.  “Okay, good – pupils equal and reactive.  Reflexes?  Good.  What do you mean, his heart rate is 30?  You just told me it’s 120.  Well, check the equipment.  I don’t care if you just checked it.  Do it again.  Take his pulse the old fashioned way in the meantime.  And get that IV going right now.  Christ, his blood pressure readings are all over the place.  Let’s get that O2 going, and keep an eye on the oxygen saturation.  And why is that thing showing a flatline?  I’ve got my fingers on his pulse right now.  Make sure you’ve got it hooked up right.  Hey, I told you to keep an eye on the O2 readings.  No, they’re not fine.  Eighty-one percent is nowhere near fine in anyone’s book.  Damn.  He’s stopped breathing again.  Okay, let’s get ready to intubate.”

Then the flurry of activity jerked up short.  The members of the medical team were pulling back from the gurney with an eerie kind of fluidity, while Daniel was… warping, his body seeming to twist like a reflection in a funhouse mirror.  Or maybe the air around him was warping, distorting like the air over hot asphalt in July.  No, worse than that, like the air coming out of a blast furnace, only it was as cold in here as it always was, maybe colder.  Sam couldn’t be sure, but the phenomenon seemed to be centered in or on or very near his hand – the hand that had touched the artifact.

Pure white light flared with the abruptness of a flashbulb going off, leaving an afterimage burned into her retinas of his hand, fingers stretched to their limit, the tendons along the back of the hand standing out in sharp relief.  Someone gasped.  Then petrified silence.  She blinked furiously, trying to clear her vision, hoping her eyes were playing tricks on her.  But they weren’t.

Daniel was gone.


	2. Imaginary Numbers

“Find anything?”

Sam looked up and blinked eyes turned gritty from way too many hours of staying awake.  Jack was leaning in the door of the lab, looking every bit as weary as she felt.  She hadn’t seen him at all in – she glanced at the clock – over twenty-four hours.  Since the disappearance.  “Maybe.  I take it you didn’t.”

Jack shook his head and walked over to the table she was working at, his hands shoved into his pockets.  “We searched the entire complex and a hefty chunk of the surrounding area.  Even put out APBs to the local and regional authorities.”  He shrugged.  “It’s a long shot, but we had to start somewhere.  What did you come up with?”

She took a deep breath and sat up straighter, pressing her palms against the tabletop to give her stretching some leverage.  It felt incredibly good after so many hours hunched over research journals, computer terminals and printouts from the equipment package they’d scavenged from one of the MALPs and set up in the infirmary.

“Tachyons,” she said, hoping that just this once, Jack wouldn’t require an explanation.  She was really too tired to be patient with him right at the moment, not to mention she didn’t know what she could possibly use as a prop for illustration.  Jack was frowning at her, so she sighed and said, “Tachyons.  Hypothetical particles that–”

“Travel faster than the speed of light.  Yeah, I know.  What makes you think we’re dealing with that?”

She paused for a moment.  Sometimes Jack surprised the hell out of her.  Sometimes, she could swear he played dumb on purpose, just to keep her on her toes.  “It’s the only explanation I can come up with that even remotely fits the readings we’ve been getting.  Okay, so no one has ever proven that tachyons actually exist–”

“No one that we know of.”

She blinked, momentarily derailed from her train of thought.  “All right.  Granted.  But we’ve got a bunch of theories, and we’ve got a very strange set of readings taken from the infirmary.  Now, according to the theories, it’s impossible to detect tachyons directly since their mass is the square root of a negative number, but it _is_ possible to measure their effects on the surrounding environment.”

“Hang on a second.  Square root of a negative number?  I know my math’s a little rusty, but isn’t that what’s called an imaginary number?”  Jack was squinting at her.  Well, well.  The good Colonel knew a little more about math than he generally let on.  She was seriously impressed.  She took a deep breath in preparation to provide a quick overview of the basic principles involved, but he’d apparently decided he’d reached the end of his attention span for the time being.  “Never mind.  We can skip the gory details for now.  So what does this mean for Daniel?”

Cut to the chase.  She could do that.  Preferred it right now, actually.  That would leave more time for a nap.  Maybe.  Hopefully.  She really needed a break.  “Well, Sir, it could very well mean that Daniel hasn’t gone some _where_ so much as some _when_.  A lot of the faster than light and tachyon theories are related to time travel.”

“Great.  Just great.”  He squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose.  “Just thinking about that stuff gives me a whopping headache.  Actually experiencing it – once in a lifetime was more than enough, thank you.”

“Yeah.  It certainly was… interesting.”

“To say the least.  Downright weird if you ask me.  A real charlie foxtrot.”  He finally looked up again, lines of exhaustion evident around his eyes.  He probably hadn’t slept since yesterday, either.  “So I guess this means we need to go back to 549 and take another look at the – thingie.”  He waved a hand absently in the air.  “Whatever it was.”

“Yes, Sir.  And since the cavern appeared to be a research lab of sorts, I’m hoping we’ll find some kind of documentation.  Scientists always make notes.”

He looked very pointedly at the piles of books and papers spread out all over the table.  “Ya think?”  He smiled briefly, then turned serious again.  “Okay, I’ll go talk to the General.”

* * * * *

Less than an hour later, they were back at 549.  Sam flipped on her flashlight, Jack and Teal’c did the same, and there were three pools of warm light where there had been four before.  She ignored the lump that formed in her throat.  She had work to do.

Just like they’d left it – one very large underground cavern containing a maze of cubicles that could have been transplanted from just about any corporation on Earth.  Cube farm in a Bat Cave, only the Bat Cave entrance was a Stargate.

“Okay,” Jack said, his voice echoing in the vast, empty space below the unseen roof of the cavern, “Carter, you go check out the area where Daniel found the thingamajig.  Teal’c, you and I’ll make a quick sweep of the rest of the area.  I’ll go left, you go right, and we’ll meet on the flip side.”  He paused and looked back at Sam.  “Anything in particular we should be looking for, Captain?”

She shrugged.  “Anything similar to the, uh, ‘thingamajig,’ I guess.”

“Okay.  More thingamajigs, it is.”  He motioned for Teal’c and Sam to move out.  “And try not to touch anything unless you know exactly what kind of thingamajig it is.”

As she headed toward the cubicle where Daniel had found the thinga– _artifact_ , she muttered, “Well, that rules out just about everything.”

“I heard that, Captain.”

She thought about making a retort, then decided that would be counterproductive.  No point in arguing when he was right.

The beam of her flashlight jerked erratically over the gray polymer walls of the cubes as she went, highlighting dust and debris spilling out into the walkways between the cubes.  She couldn’t imagine that anyone would actually be able to work in this kind of mess, so the inhabitants must’ve left in a hurry.  That hadn’t stopped SG-1 from playing Pandora, poking around looking for nifty little boxes.  And Daniel had found one.  She could only hope that if the aliens believed in the architecture of cubes, maybe they also believed in the engineer’s creed of RTFM.  She’d be perfectly happy to Read The Fucking Manual if there was one to be found.  In fact, she’d even salt and pepper it and eat every last page if that’s what it took.

Two hours later, they regrouped at the Stargate.  She held up a stack of papers of all different colors, sizes, and conditions from perfectly smooth to crumpled like someone had been playing trashcan basketball with them.  All of them were covered with sketches, notes and various other symbols in different colors of ink.  Apparently, the people, or whatever they were, who worked here hadn’t been too fussy about what they wrote on or what they used to write.  There were even some sheets that looked like they’d been written on with something very similar to crayon.

“Notes?” Jack asked, quirking an eyebrow.

“I hope so.  The writing looks like it might be related to Ancient script.  I’ll have to get McConnell to work on the translation since – well, since Daniel isn’t available right now.”  She paused a moment.  She really, really wished that lump in her throat would go away.  “I also found Daniel’s video camera.  He must’ve dropped it when he got zapped.  What did you and Teal’c find?”

“Couple of more thingamajigs – different sizes and shapes, but definitely thingamajig-y.  None of them were in one piece, though.  They all had guts and stuff hanging out.  You want to gather up some more notes from those areas?”

“Maybe later.  This is plenty to start with.  And I’d like to take the device back for study, too,” she added quickly, even though she already knew what the answer would be.

“No, no and _no_.”  Jack shook his head to emphasize his answer, as if she needed that.  But he wasn’t finished yet.  “Oh, and did I say, ‘No’?  That was the one stipulation the General put on this mission, and given our less than stellar track record with alien artifacts in the past, I can’t say I blame him.  Paper should be relatively safe.  I don’t think anyone’s ever died from a paper cut.”

“That we know of,” Sam couldn’t help but add.

Jack stared at her for a couple of seconds before saying, “I think you’ve been spending entirely too much time around me, Captain.”

* * * * *

The times were few and far between that Sam had seen this much activity in the ‘Gate Room when they returned from a mission.   The usual contingent of soldiers guarding against unauthorized circumvention of the iris was there, at their posts and ever-vigilant, but they were having a difficult time keeping clear line of sight to the ‘Gate.  There were piles upon piles of long metal boxes stacked at regular intervals in the usually clear area in front of the ‘Gate, along with a slew of miscellaneous personnel being herded by Sergeant Siler in an attempt to remove the containers in something approaching an orderly fashion.

“What the–” Jack muttered as he strode down the ramp ahead of Sam.  “Sergeant!  What the hell is going on here?”

Siler turned a harried expression toward the returning team and popped a quick salute as he said, “Removal operation, Sir.”

“I can see that, Sergeant.”  Jack flipped open the lid of the nearest box and peered inside.  “That’s World War II surplus ordinance.  Who dumped this crap on us, and what’s it doing in the ‘Gate Room?”

“Well, Sir,” Siler replied tersely, “it just appeared here.”

“What do you mean, just appeared?”

“Exactly that, Sir.  It apparently started with a few small objects in the infirmary, but it’s been spreading for the last hour or so.  Reports are coming in from all over the lower levels of the complex – things just disappearing and reappearing at random.  And now we’re getting stuff like this,” he gestured at the surrounding boxes, “stuff that shouldn’t be here at all.”

“Well, maybe not _now_ ,” Sam put in, causing both Jack and Siler to turn and face her, questioning expressions on their faces.  She sighed.  At least the props had already been provided for this explanation.  “This room started out as a missile silo, but once the missiles were decommissioned, it was converted to a storage facility before the Space Command and then the SGC moved in.”  She was still getting blank looks.  It was so obvious to her that she had to remind herself that not everyone’s mind worked the same way hers did.  “Tachyons, Colonel.”

Jack looked like he wanted to slap someone, most likely himself.  Siler, though, was staring at her like she’d just sprouted another head.  “But those are–”

“Theoretical,” Jack finished for him.  “Yeah, we know.”  He directed his attention back at Sam.  “Do you think this has to do with what happened to Daniel?”

“Very likely, sir.  It seems like an awfully unusual coincidence.”

Jack’s face took on a decidedly determined cast.  “Siler, where’s the General?”

“Right here, Colonel,” Hammond said in an even voice as he entered the ‘Gate Room and began threading his way around piles of boxes over to where SG-1 was standing.  Sam could tell from the stiffness of his posture that he was anything but calm.  Even when standing at attention, he normally had an assured and relaxed air to him that was decidedly absent at the moment.  The tension around his eyes was a dead giveaway, too.

Jack took a few steps forward to meet him.  “Sergeant Siler filled us in on what’s been happening.  Captain Carter thinks it might be linked to her theory about the tachyons.”

“That’s what Doctor Fraiser thought too.  She’s been right smack in the middle of this since it all started.  She had to move the medical facilities when the incidents in the infirmary increased.  Did you find anything on 549 that might explain this, or better yet, give us a way to stop it?”

Sam stepped forward.  “I brought back some notes that might give us some clues.  I’ll need Private McConnell’s assistance with the translation.”

“You’ve got it.”  Hammond nodded sharply as he motioned to a passing airman.  “Put that down and go find Private McConnell.  Have him meet Captain Carter in the briefing room ASAP.”

“He was helping us here, Sir, but he’s in the infirmary now,” the airman said hesitantly.  “He twisted his ankle pretty badly.”

Hammond paused for just the slightest moment before he said very calmly, “All right, son.  Carry on.”  He turned back to Sam, but the hint of frustration she could’ve sworn had been there was already gone.  “Captain, to the infirmary.  Teal’c, see if you can lend a hand here.  Colonel, you’re with me.”


	3. Juggling Possibilities

If the ‘Gate Room had been chaos, this was bedlam.  Sam was completely taken aback by the sheer number of SGC personnel packing the place.  Her eyes scanned the room, coming to rest on Janet, who was executing a juggling act worthy of the most skilled air traffic controller – handling patients, medical personnel and charts with brisk efficiency.

Sam stood just inside the doorway for a moment, not wanting to interfere with the choreographed mayhem, but it wasn’t more than a minute or two before Janet noted the new body entering her airspace.  She gave Sam a thin, exasperated smile and held up one finger to tell her to wait where she was.

After scribbling a few final notes on a chart, Janet waved the clipboard at an aide, who managed to snag it as he narrowly avoided a midair collision with another worker on her way to check out a patient on the other side of the room.  Sam did a double-take.  The patient was none other than Private Ryan McConnell, one leg sans boot and sock stretched out in front of him on the gurney.  Ankles definitely were not supposed to be that color.  And an ankle that size had no business being on a man of McConnell’s slight stature.  Damn.  Well, at least it wasn’t a head or eye injury.  He could translate with one leg propped on a stool.

“Sam.  Am I ever glad to see you.”  Janet let out a frustrated sigh.  “This place has gone to hell in a handbasket.”

“I can see that.  What’s with all the casualties?  This isn’t affecting people, is it?”  A gruesome thought about pieces of human bodies joining the disappearing act sent a shiver up her spine and right back down into her gut.

“Not directly, no.  Thank God.  It seems that only inorganic objects are being affected and only within a limited area.  Most of the injuries are minor – people tripping and falling over things that weren’t there a few seconds earlier, back strains from lifting heavy objects to get them cleared out of essential areas.  Even had one patient who had the rubber soles and metal grommets disappear right off his boots, leaving just the leather behind.  It happened so fast, he tripped over his own feet and ended up with a pulled hamstring and a broken nose.”  Janet shook her head in exasperation as they were almost plowed over by one of the medical personnel.  She grabbed Sam’s elbow to guide her out into the hallway.  “It wasn’t too bad at first, just small items disappearing in the infirmary.  We can work around a few missing bandages and bottles of medication, but it went from a few to a lot in a very short amount of time.  When the larger equipment started going AWOL, we had no choice but to bug out.  Fortunately, the disappearances didn’t follow us here.  It seems to be limited to the lower levels of the complex.”

“I know.  It’s a regular Bermuda Triangle down there.  They’ve closed off all the nonessential areas and evacuated as many of the personnel as possible, but we’ve still got teams offworld.  They’re doing their best to keep the ‘Gate and Control Room and access corridors clear until we can get the last of them back home.”

“Okay, we can certainly deal with a few more casualties for a good cause.”  Janet nodded and averted her eyes for a moment.  She was probably avoiding thinking about the same thing Sam was – the one person who was missing and wouldn’t be coming back through the ‘Gate.  “The sooner we get things back to normal around here, the better.  Let’s just hope the ‘Gate itself stays intact long enough to bring everyone back.”

The shiver ran back up Sam’s spine, but this time it decided to take up residence across her shoulders and at the base of her skull.  “Bite your tongue, Janet.”

“I don’t think so.  I’d probably have to stitch it up myself.”

Sam didn’t laugh.  She was temporarily caught up in mulling over the possibility of the Stargate disappearing.  They had a spare, but that didn’t allow them to be careless with the original.  “Let’s just hope our luck is a little better than that today.  Maybe the ‘Gate’s immune to tachyons.  The naquedah might protect it.”

“I sincerely hope you’re right.  Everything else seems to be fair game.  We already had part of the main generator disappear, and then we found out the backup generator was gone, too.  Whole sections of the complex were blacked out for a good fifteen minutes.  You wouldn’t believe what an upswing in casualties that caused.  They’ve got people down there now running all kinds of crosspatches to auxiliary generators and backup computer systems on the upper levels.”  She paused and looked at Sam for a moment.  “So is there something you need me for?”

“Actually, I’m here to steal one of your patients – Private McConnell.”

“Oh, okay.  Cortez should have his ankle wrapped up and ready to go in just a few minutes, then he’s all yours – as long as you promise not to run him around any obstacle courses.”

“Nah.  Maybe I’ll run him through the wringer, but it’s the intellectual variety.  I need him to do some translating.  We found some notes that might be of use.”

“Good.  Good.”  Janet looked away again, probably trying not to think about the reason why McConnell had become the first choice for translation projects.  “Well, I’d better get back into the fray here.  Is there anything else you need right now?”

Sam had a feeling the question went a little deeper than providing information or medical services.  Janet was offering conversation and a healthy dose of commiseration, but that would have to come later.  Sam started to shake her head, then froze as another thought occurred to her.  “You said that only inorganic objects were being affected by the tachyons?”

Janet was frowning, her hands shoved deep into her lab coat pockets – probably balled into fists.  “Yes.  That’s been my observation, and others have backed it up.”

Sam swallowed and realized the lump was back in her throat.  Oh, God.  “What about Daniel, then?”

There was a quick flash of intense emotion in Janet’s eyes.  “I–  I didn’t even think about that.”

Of course.  They were all doing whatever they could not to think about it.  The greater the wound, the more you tried to distract yourself so you didn’t have to think about what parts of your body might not make it intact.  But she had to think about it now.  She couldn’t ignore it, but at the same time, she couldn’t let it get to her.  She had to switch off her heart and kick her brain into high gear.  “Maybe it was because he touched the alien object directly.  Maybe the tachyons, or whatever we’re dealing with here, were altered through interaction with a living organism.  Maybe what we’re experiencing now is simply a residual effect from the tachyons transporting him somewhere else.  Or maybe,” _go away, you damn lump,_ “maybe he didn’t go anywhere at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“What if he’s still here?  What if–  What if he was–”  Sam paused, fought the knot of emotion back down, tried again.  “What if his molecules were broken down and scattered?  What if it’s those molecules – tachyon-charged or however you want to think of them – that are causing the disappearances?  I mean, is that totally ridiculous or is it possible?”  A hint of desperation managed to creep into the last question.  Please tell me it’s ridiculous.  Please tell me I’m crazy.  Tell me I’m being hysterical, anything.

Janet stared at her for an agonizingly long moment before she looked away.  She didn’t say anything at all.


	4. Stitches in Time

“Who the hell are ‘small ones’ and why the hell are they so obsessed with ‘dancing in the sun’?  This doesn’t make any sense!”  Sam threw down her pencil and groaned in frustration as it rolled off the table and onto the floor – one more annoyance to add to the pile.

“Ma’am?” McConnell asked very quietly.  “Are you all right?”

Great.  That’s just what she needed.  Someone else checking up on her.  She’d already had to deal with repeated visits from Jack and Janet, both of them barely maintaining a balance between demanding results and nagging her about not pushing herself too hard.  How the hell was she supposed to do both?  Forty-eight hours of dead ends and loose ends, brainstorming and brainwracking, running around in circles and being run through the wringer.  She felt like hell, probably looked like hell and didn’t give a damn, and her mouth tasted like something had crawled in there and died.

“I’m fine, McConnell.  I’m just getting hung up on this thing about ‘small ones’ for some reason.  It’s probably not important.  I guess I picked up someone’s attempts at poetry along with the scientific notes.”  She paused, drew a deep breath, ran her hand through her hair and instantly regretted it due to the decidedly not-clean feel of her head.  “Not every single scrap I brought back had something to do with tachyons.  It’s just bugging me because the rest of it translated pretty well, apart from the fact that we’re dealing with some very advanced concepts.  Boy, what I wouldn’t give for a nice, normal quadratic equation at this point.”

Jack picked that particular moment to return for another one of his combination progress reports and tightening of the thumbscrews.  “Sorry.  I’m fresh out of quadratic equations at the moment, Captain.  But I’ll write you an I.O.U. if you’ve got some answers for me.”

For a handful of seconds, she sorted through about a dozen sarcastic responses, but then the lump decided to make its reappearance in her throat.  Damn.  She really needed some sleep.  She needed a shower.  She needed a decent meal.  She needed that godawful lump to go away.

“Okay, answers.”  She stifled a yawn and rummaged through the papers spread out in front of her until she found the one she wanted.  She nudged her stool into a slow 180 and held it out to Jack.  Boy, did he ever look like hell.  Like something the cat dragged in.  Like something the cat hacked up.  No, like something the cat left in the litter box.

“What’s this?”

“Answers.”

“Care to elaborate, Captain?”

_Okay, Sam.  Enough.  Pull yourself together.  You’ve actually made quite a bit of progress.  In fact, you’ve got just about everything you hoped for here – all but the most important part.  You’ve had your suspicions about what happened to him confirmed, you’ve even got some pretty exciting scientific possibilities, but you still don’t have a way to get him back.  There’s no answer for that right now.  You have to focus on the answers you do have._

She slid off the stool and forced her body into an upright posture.  Joints groaned and cracked in relief at being given a respite from the grindstone.  “As we suspected, we’re dealing with the results of a time travel experiment that went haywire.  The device that Daniel,” she hurried past the name, narrowly avoiding the lump, “found was a kind of tachyon generator.  How that’s even remotely possible is beyond me since creating tachyons should require massive amounts of energy that couldn’t possibly be contained in such a small device.  Then again, I still find it unbelievable that the Stargate manages to contain the levels of energy it does.  And I’m also not quite sure how it is that the tachyons are remaining localized given their faster-than-light velocity, but string theory could explain that.”

“String theory?  As in thread, rope, fishing line, that sort of thing?”

She shrugged.  “In a way.  String theory postulates that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are not point-like particles, but incredibly tiny constructs called strings.  What we perceive as particles are actually fluctuations along those strings.  The strings associated with the tachyons produced by the device on 549 could conceivably be looped, keeping them confined to a specific area, sort of like going around and around a circular racetrack.”

“So these tachyon loops jumped from the generator into Daniel?”  He didn’t seem to be having a problem saying the name.  Damn him.

“Yes, that seems to be the case.”

“So why didn’t these little loops go with him?  Why is stuff disappearing here, where he’s not?”

She resolutely pushed aside her earlier hypothesis that Daniel might still, in a way, be here.  There was very little hope down that path and no point in pursuing it unless they were ready to give up.  She certainly wasn’t.  Not by a long shot.  “It’s possible the loops were unstable.  That could be what was causing his vital signs to fluctuate.  When he disappeared, some of the loops might have shredded and dispersed through the lower levels of the complex before restabilizing.  That could account for the initial spread of the disappearances and the fact that they now seem to be contained within a specific area.”

“And the fact that only inorganic objects are now being affected?”

Geez, he had a lot of questions.  And was expecting a corresponding number of answers, apparently.  “I’m not really sure about that.  Some of the notes talk about the experiment being tailored to allow living creatures to move through time.  It could be that the tachyons were engineered to interact only with the carbon chain molecules in organic matter, but after they shredded, their structure was altered.  That’s a huge guess, though.  I have very little to back that up.”

“What about this?”  Jack held up the piece of paper she had handed to him at the start of this interrogation session.

“Yes, that.  Well, it seems the inventor of the tachyon generator believed in planning for all contingencies.  He also built a device that would destroy the tachyons by adding energy to them.”

“Adding energy?  Wouldn’t that charge them up even more?”

“Well, no, not exactly.  Tachyons sort of turn the usual laws of physics on their head.  Normal objects would accelerate when energy is added to them, but tachyons decelerate as they absorb more energy.  Add enough energy, and you could theoretically bring them back down below the lightspeed barrier.  No more tachyons.  That’s a schematic of the tachyon decelerator.”

“Ah.  Well.”  Jack turned the piece of paper sideways and squinted at it.  “Of course it is.  So it’s back to 549 to see if we can rustle up one of these?”

“Yes, Sir.  That would seem to be the simplest approach.  We don’t really have the means here to build one from scratch.  At least, I don’t think so.  We’re not exactly sure what all of the symbols mean, and it’ll take a while to untangle the math involved.”

“But you’re… sure… about what this thing will do if we bring it back here and set it off?”

“As sure as I can be.”

“That’s not giving me warm fuzzies, Captain.”

“Sorry, Sir.  Fresh out of warm fuzzies.”  Jack just nodded and continued staring at the piece of paper, so she added, “There _is_ one little side effect I should mention.”

“And that would be?”

“The energy and associated radiation emitted by the tachyon decelerator is harmful to living creatures – fatal in high concentrations, and you need high concentrations to slow tachyons down enough to nullify them.  The inventor and three of his staff were killed when they had to activate the failsafe during the first full trial of the tachyon generator.”

“Doesn’t sound very failsafe to me.  And that’s more than just a ‘little’ side effect.”  He finally looked up from the schematic and peered at her with eyes so dull and lifeless the only message they were sending was exhaustion.  “So we rig it with a timer and evacuate the area.  Do we know what the range of this tachyon decelerator is?”

“Yes.  That’s one thing we’re certain of.  Deciphering their units of measurement was relatively straightforward and very exact, based on distances at the atomic level.  The effect would be confined to the lower levels of the base.”  She noticed his raised eyebrow.  “I can show you the math if you’d like.”

“No, that’s quite all right, Captain.  We need to do this sometime before Christmas.  I’ll just assume your math skills are nowhere near as rusty as mine.”

“Yes, Sir.”  She managed a small smile, but didn’t have the energy to keep it up for more than a few seconds.

“So is there anything else this tachyon decelerator is going to do I should know about?  Like turn the ‘Gate Room into another Chernobyl?”

“Well, I’m not entirely certain of the mechanics involved or exactly what kind of energy we’re talking about, but just like the range of the device, the half-life of the radiation was very easy to decipher.  It’s incredibly short, something on the order of 15 minutes or so.  I know that sounds absurd, but I checked it about 20 times myself and had every other person with a math background I could get my hands on check it too.”

“Did you remember to carry the one?”  She glared at him, but he just shrugged.  “All right.  If it’s the best we’ve got, we’ll go with it.  But we’ll push the all clear out to 30 minutes just to be on the safe side.  We can use the internal radiation sensors to double-check before we start moving back in.  Okay.  There’s no time like the present, no pun intended.  The tachyons haven’t spread at all over the last 48 hours, but who knows when they might decide to get antsy and take a little field trip.  Find Teal’c and get geared up.  I’ll go inform the General and meet you in the ‘Gate Room in 15 minutes.”

* * * * *

Thank God for caffeine.  Without it, Sam was certain she’d be nothing more than a puddle of goo – exhausted, hungry, grimy goo.  Would probably make an interesting specimen on a slide under a microscope.  She might have smiled at the thought if it weren’t for gravity.  Good ol’ gravity.  Keeping your feet on the ground.  Dragging you down.  So caffeine must be anti-gravity.

McConnell was lucky.  He got to sleep.  Try to sleep anyway.  He’d downed about three cups of coffee for every one of hers.  It was a wonder he wasn’t floating somewhere up near the ceiling.  She’d had just enough time to play human crutch for him and get him settled in one of the barracks rooms – if letting him flop onto the bunk could be called getting him settled.  Gravity helped get him from her shoulder to the bunk.  The bunk kept gravity from being a nuisance.  So bunks were anti-gravity, too.

She could do with a little less gravity right now.  It seemed to be taking forever for the ‘Gate to dial up P4J549.  She knew it was just her own subjective impression.  Caffeine might be keeping her on her feet, but it was doing nothing for her patience.

“Chevron six engaged.”  _Thank God.  Thank the Ancients, actually._

And then – nothing.  It shut down, went silent, stopped moving, the chevrons clicking off like someone had flipped a switch.  _Shit.  Please let it only be the generator._

“What the hell?” Jack muttered.  Teal’c was as impassive as ever, standing at the ready as ever.  Did Jaffa drink coffee?  She couldn’t remember him ever having any on their missions.  Maybe their biology couldn’t handle it.  Maybe he just didn’t like the stuff.  She’d have to ask him about that.  Later.  She could tell, though, that Jack was every bit as edgy as she was.  He proved it by spinning back toward the control room and shouting, “What the hell is going on here?”

A pause.  “Checking systems, Sir.”  Another pause.  There was shouting going on in there too, but the airman had clicked the microphone off, so all she saw were strained expressions and mouths moving rapidly.  They were frowning.  So gravity was doing its work in there as well.

The microphone clicked back on.  “Part of the main generator went AWOL again, Sir, along with the cables running up to the backup generators.  Siler’s down there now, but he says it’ll take a few hours to make repairs.”

“Oh, for crying out loud.”  Sam let out a noise that was half choke and half laugh as soon as she realized what she’d said.  Maybe she really had been spending too much time around the Colonel.

“You took the words right out of my mouth, Captain.”

“Yeah, well here’s another one for you.  This really sucks.”


	5. Backlash

Six more hours without sleep.  “Sucked” was really too mild a word for it.  Sam ground the heels of her palms into her eyes.  She could swear a permanent alluvial crust had formed in her mouth from all the coffee she’d washed down.  Brushing her teeth and gargling half a bottle of mouthwash hadn’t helped.  Her tastebuds were entombed, and she’d probably need a jackhammer to get them back out.  Even the spritz of perfume she’d settled for in place of a more time-consuming shower did little to lift her spirits.

Rig it with a timer, Jack had said, like it was so easy.  Snap your fingers and bang, there’s a timer, set and ready to go.  It wasn’t that simple, but she hadn’t had the strength to argue with him.  Much easier just to go and make it happen like she always did.

What the hell was that noise?  She hooked her foot around one of the stool legs and swiveled the seat around.  McConnell was humming, something mangled and off-key, tapping his pencil against the desktop in a sloppy rhythm.  Completely absorbed, poring over the myriad of tiny notations filling the margins of the tachyon decelerator diagram.  She felt like yelling at him to shut up, but restrained herself.  She really needed his expertise on this one.

She also needed a meal that didn’t come out of a vending machine or that hadn’t turned ice cold on the tray while her brain was focused elsewhere.  And a couple of hours uninterrupted rest in a bed – any bed, as long as it had a pillow and a blanket.  Then again, maybe the blanket was optional.

McConnell looked up.  She hadn’t meant to stare at him, but her mind had gone wandering off while she was looking in his general direction.  He coughed.  She noticed that his hand was gripping the handle of his coffee mug – not all that unusual, really, apart from the white knuckles.  He must’ve forgotten how to swallow.  “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m–”  He coughed again and reached for a napkin to wipe his mouth.  “I’m fine.  And I think… I might be done.”  He turned the diagram around to face her and pushed it across the desk.

“Oh.”  That wasn’t what she was expecting him to say.  So what had she been expecting?  Not important right now.  Maybe after she got some sleep, she could figure it out.  She got up and walked over to his desk, leaning over and propping herself on her elbows, then blinking a couple of times to bring the diagram into focus.  “Hmm.  Okay, this makes sense.  This goes here, and that goes there.  Yeah, that should work.”  She looked up.  “Thanks, McConnell.  Good job.”

“My pleasure, Ma’am,” he said softly, then started to fiddle with his coffee cup.  It was hard to tell since his complexion tended to be ruddy, but she could swear he was blushing.  Must have a hard time accepting praise.  No, wait.  Daniel had told her McConnell had a crush on her.  She remembered the conversation with a ridiculous degree of clarity.  She’d accused Daniel of thinking every good-looking soldier on the base under the age of thirty had a crush on her and had teasingly asked him if he was jealous.  He’d made some comment about being immune since he was over the age of thirty.  If only he were immune to tachyons.

“Once all this is over, McConnell, how about I take you out to dinner?”  She had absolutely no idea what possessed her to say that.  She was definitely getting loopy.  Going, going, gone.  Too late to take it back now, though.

McConnell was the perfect picture of a possum staring into the headlights of an oncoming truck.  Yeah, he was definitely blushing, right up to the tips of his ears.  “Ma’am?  Isn’t that–  I mean, I’m flattered and all, but isn’t that against regs?”

“Maybe if you want to be a real stickler about it.”  She sighed and reached over to drag a stray chair a little closer to the desk, then sat down, folding her arms on the desktop and propping her chin on her arms.  Maybe she could just take a little nap right here.  It was a reasonably comfortable position.  “But you’re not under my direct command.  Besides, it’s not a date – just a thank-you.”  She had the feeling she wasn’t telling the whole truth, but she wasn’t sure if she was lying to him or to herself.  Maybe a little bit of both.  She was only human, after all.  What the hell.  They could sort it out later.  If there even was anything to sort out.  One step at a time.  “I know a great little Italian place – nice table for three in the corner by the window.”

A whole web of expressions knotted across his face.  She didn’t have the energy to try and untangle it now, and she suspected it would be days before he could make heads or tails of it himself.  “Oh.  Well, of course, we’d want to take Dr. Jackson along.  To celebrate and all.”

She could’ve kissed him for that.  She wished she could be that certain they’d find Daniel.  The odds didn’t look good.  “Maybe.  Actually, I was thinking of you, me, and your foot.  Besides, Daniel doesn’t much care for Italian food.”  She only hoped he would have the chance to turn down the invitation.

* * * * *

_Alone.  Everyone gone.  Four days gone._

_A bomb.  Ohshitabomb.  Gotta do something.  Now.  No one to help._

_Timer ticking down.  All zeros, flashing red.  Too late._

Dead.  He should be dead, shouldn’t he?  It wasn’t the first time he’d thought that, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d been wrong.  One of these days, he was going to guess right.  For now, though, he seemed to have been spared the logical results of a bomb blast at such close range.  And there had been something else, hadn’t there?  Something about people disappearing or way too much time passing?  Or maybe he’d skipped over it, skipped over time, over hours and days, like a rock skipping over the surface of a pond, until – kerplunk – awareness snapped back into his body.

No, he definitely wasn’t dead.  Death couldn’t possibly hurt this much, at least not once it was over and done with.  It felt like someone had scrubbed his entire body inside and out with steel wool, then rinsed him off with a bucket of lemon juice.

Today was either the worst day of his life, or the luckiest day of his life.  Was it possible for it to be both?

“Daniel?  Oh my God.  Daniel!”

Aha.  A part of his body that didn’t hurt.  The voice was sharp, crystal clear, and very close by, but it didn’t hurt his ears, despite the sound being a little tinny.  Maybe he should try opening an eye.  Just one eye.  Slowly.

That was interesting.  Concrete.  He’d never realized how interesting the texture of concrete could be.  Maybe he’d push his luck and try the other eye.  That was a little more difficult, like it was gummed shut with dried tears, but he managed it with only a slight twinge of pain along his eyebrow.  Okay.  More concrete, only with depth perception now.  Sort of.  This close up, it was hard to keep his eyes from crossing.

Oh.  A shoe.  Black pump.  Military issue.  With a foot in it.  And another foot, and another shoe.  A matched pair.

The leg attached to one of the feet bent, the knee pressing down against the concrete under the crisp hem of a neatly pressed skirt.  _Hello, knee.  Nice to meet you.  Now who do you belong to?_  He twisted his head slightly and immediately wished he hadn’t.  So that’s what it felt like to have an ice pick driven into the top of your skull – frontal lobotomy without anesthesia.

“Daniel?”  A face came into view.  Janet.  Oh, good.  Maybe she had some of those little white pills.  Maybe a whole bottle of them.  Maybe a continuous IV drip of painkillers du jour.

She touched him, lightly, on the shoulder.  Oh, God.  Bad move.  She may as well have skewered him with the largest spring-loaded syringe she had in her inventory.  The concrete and the feet and the knee and the face swam.  Something gurgled in his throat.

There were other sounds now, scuffling of feet, muffled voices, Janet’s voice again, urgent, but he didn’t think she was talking to him now.  Hard to tell.  The clarity of his hearing was gone, stuffed with a wad of cotton batting.  That was good, though.  The batting seemed to have wrapped itself all the way around his body, like a cocoon.  Warm, safe, comforting.  What would he be when he emerged?

What day was it?

Why did it matter?

It mattered.  He had to know.

He cracked an eye open again.  No concrete this time.  Ceiling.  Lights.  Faces, bending over him, concentrating, looking confused, looking concerned.

“Daniel?”  Another voice, suddenly clear.  Female.  Not Janet.  Sam?  Yes, Sam.  “How long have you been here, Daniel?”

“What day is it?”  Was that his voice?  Had he actually said something?  It felt like his mouth had been shot full of novocaine.  His tongue felt thick, but at least it didn’t hurt.  Add it to the list, a very short list.

“It’s Friday, Daniel.  Can you tell me how long you’ve been here?”  There was something in Sam’s voice, gentle, weary, almost hysterical, wired.

“What – date?”  The words sounded slurred to him, but he couldn’t be sure if that was because his tongue wasn’t working quite right or because his ears were going on the fritz again.

“Friday.  June 25.”  A long pause.  “1999.”

“Time?”

“Just after nine o’clock.  In the morning.”

That was good.  Wasn’t it?  At least four days hadn’t evaporated right out from under him again.  He let his eyes drift shut.

“Oh, no.  No!  It’s happening again.”

Who was that?  Sam?  What was happening again?  She sounded worried.  No, frustrated.  No.  Panicked.  He wrenched his eyes open, ignoring the thousand little sparks of pain that skittered across the surface of his face.  She was backing away from him, staring at him in a way that made him want to flinch and reach out to her all at the same time.  And then everything twisted, stretched beyond limits, tore into shreds.  The sadist with the steel wool was back, only this time, he’d brought a sandblaster.  It wasn’t quite the kind of sandman he’d been hoping for.


	6. Tuesday, Take Two

The third time was supposed to be the charm.  This was now attempt number seven to fill out the medical report on Daniel’s disappearance after yesterday’s aborted visit to P4J549, and Janet had yet to get much further than the date at the top of the page.  Monday, June 21, 1999, was a day she wasn’t likely to forget anytime soon.

Maybe she could just leave the file open – indefinitely, if need be.  Maybe she should just give up on attempt number seven and go have a cigarette.  It meant going all the way up to the surface, past all the security checkpoints and out of the facility.  Maybe she’d have two while she was at it.  She’d been trying to cut back lately, but somehow, she’d managed to go though an entire pack in the past day.  That had been a lot of trips up and down, back and forth.  Maybe the exercise was canceling out the effects of the tar and nicotine.  Yeah, right.  And her ex had been an absolute angel.

What she really wanted was a good, stiff drink.  Whiskey.  Chivas Regal.  Something smooth with a kick.  But she couldn’t very well do that while she was still on duty.  She’d have to settle for a cigarette.

Just as she had dug her lighter out of the corner of her desk drawer where it was trying to hide – must be in league with the Surgeon General – the nerve-rattling sound of a tray of instruments hitting the floor came from outside her office door, out in the infirmary.  She gritted her teeth and took several deep breaths.  Maybe she should just keep Corelli on call for emergency situations.  When the tension was high and lives were quite literally on the line, Corelli was all efficiency and focus.  When there wasn’t much to do apart from routine squaring away of supplies or monitoring of stable patients, all of her fingers seemed to turn into thumbs and she sprouted an additional left foot.  And she was constantly apologizing for it.  Janet was sure that’s what she was about to do when she stuck her curly little blonde head around the edge of the office door.

Janet waved a preemptory hand.  “It’s Okay, Lieutenant.  Just pick it up and put it all back in the autoclave.  No harm done.”  And then she noticed that Corelli was staring at her wide-eyed and ashen-faced.  Apologetic she may be, but she never got that rattled, not even elbow-deep in blood and guts and vomit.

“What is it, Lydia?” she asked warily as she reached for her stethoscope and pulled it around her neck.

“It’s Doctor Jackson, Ma’am.  He’s back.”

“What?”  She just stared at the other woman for what must’ve been a full ten or fifteen seconds.  She couldn’t quite wrap her brain around what she’d just been told.  Lydia didn’t seem to be able to, either.  She just pushed the door the rest of the way open and pointed behind her.

He was there on the gurney, looking like he’d never left.  Well, not exactly.  She joked enough about people looking like death warmed over, but this time, it wouldn’t have been a joke.  Not that there was any overt sign of trauma.  He simply looked drained – of color, of life, of the vital spark of intelligence that was so much a part of who he was.  This wasn’t Daniel lying here and yet, horribly, it was.

He was trying to get up off the gurney.  Failing miserably too.  She shoved the tray from Lydia’s mishap away with her toe, wincing at the rattle and scrape of metal against concrete.  She paused a moment to collect herself, then very gently pushed Daniel back onto the bed.  It didn’t take much effort.  He sagged back at the slight pressure of her fingers and just lay there, looking at her with watery, bloodshot eyes.

“Daniel?  Are you all right?”  Stupid question, Janet.  Of course he isn’t all right.

Not surprisingly, he didn’t reply, so she pulled her stethoscope from around her neck and started a basic check of vital signs.  She snapped her fingers at Corelli, who was just standing there, and pointed to the tray of instruments where they had slid against the wall.  “Pick that up, then go and page Clark and Sutherland.”  The words were calm – she was amazed, in fact, that she was able to sound that calm at the moment – but Corelli wasn’t moving.  Okay, Corelli.  Emergency – do your thing.  She allowed a hint of the jumble of wildly shifting emotions she was feeling to push their way into her voice.  “Now, Lieutenant.  Move.  And try to find Colonel O’Neill while you’re at it.”

That had the desired result.  The blonde curls bobbed in acknowledgement.  Janet returned her full attention to her patient, wadding her emotions into a ball, stuffing them as hard as she could into an imaginary closet and slamming the door.  She could pick through them later and try to figure out what they were.  Right now, it was all business and efficiency – pulse, respiration, pupils – all steady, responsive.  Good.

The light shining in his eyes seemed to have broken through to wherever it was he was drifting.  “Janet?”  He blinked and licked his lips, turning his head fractionally and squinting at her.

“Yes, Daniel.  It’s me.  You’re in the infirmary.  You’re going to be just fine.  Just relax and let us take care of you.”

He nodded and closed his eyes.

Back to work.  Blood pressure, temperature.  Damn it.  Where were Clark and Sutherland?

Daniel’s eyes snapped open.  “What day–  What day is it?”  His voice cracked in the middle of the question, but he managed to get it all out on the second try.

“What day do you think it is?”

He frowned, his forehead wrinkling.  “Friday,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.  There were times when her life was such a roller coaster ride that she would’ve had to check, but after staring at the date for the last twenty-some-odd hours…  She let out a little sigh and tried to smile at him reassuringly.  “June 25th,” he added.

She could feel a reflection of his frown creeping across her face.  He said it like he knew it was a fact, but she knew for a fact that June 25th was still three days away.  He was probably just disoriented.  “Are you sure?”  She wanted to give him another opportunity, but she was also trying to distract him from the tourniquet she was tying around his arm in preparation for drawing blood.  Odd.  There was a smear of fresh blood on the inside of his arm where Sutherland had inserted the IV the day before.  That should’ve scabbed over by now.  Coagulation deficiency?

“Yes.  Positive.  Sam told me.”  His voice was clear, if a bit rough, but his eyes were still glassy.  Not to mention that Sam could hardly have told an absent person what day it was and wouldn’t be likely to tell him the wrong date in any event.  “I looked at your calendar,” he said.  “Pizza night with Cassie.”

She froze in the middle of swabbing the crook of his elbow with Betadine.  Pizza night was tonight, not Friday.  She’d probably have to change it, but why not tomorrow or Thursday?  There’d have to be a good reason to put it off so long.  Gooseflesh ran down her arms as she realized she was probably looking at the reason right now.  And matter-of-factly accepting the possibility there might be some kind of time travel involved in his disappearance of the day before.

She snapped out of her daze and went back to preparing the vials as Sutherland finally stumbled into the infirmary – rumpled, buttoning his shirt as he entered, and with a raging case of bed-head.  Damn.  She’d forgotten that he’d just gotten off a 24-hour shift and was probably trying to catch up on some sleep.  She briefly considered sending him back to bed, but she needed the assistance.  Despite his appearance, he seemed fully alert and stepped up to the other side of the gurney with a nod and an expectant expression.  A brief flicker of confusion and surprise crossed his face upon seeing who the patient was, but it passed quickly.

Back to business.  Daniel flinched as she stuck the needle into his arm, but he didn’t say anything.  “What, no accusing me of turning you into a pincushion?”  He just smiled faintly and closed his eyes.  She handed the vials to Sutherland, one by one as they filled.  “Take those down to the lab.  Have them run a full blood panel – electrolytes, blood gasses, the works.  And tell Doctor Ramsey that we need to get an MRI scheduled, stat.”  A sharp nod, and he was gone without a word.

“Janet?”  Daniel again.  The way he was looking at her reminded her of Cassie after she’d awakened from a nightmare.  “What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure right now, but we’re going to find out, okay?  I’m going to get you set up with a pulse oximeter and an EKG.”  As she turned to collect the equipment she needed, she almost tripped over the MALP instrument package that Sam had set up.  She’d have to get Sam – or someone – to move it, but that could wait for now.  She could work around it.  She could work around practically anything as long as she didn’t have to feel anything until later.

Clark finally strolled into the infirmary, suppressing a yawn and glancing casually at her watch.  When she took note of what was going on, she hurried over to the gurney, snapped to attention and saluted crisply.  Janet barely paused in her scavenger hunt for all the bits and pieces she needed to hook up the EKG.  She really needed to have a word with the staff – again – about putting things back where they belonged.  “At ease, airman.  This is an infirmary, not a parade ground.”  The poor woman looked at her hand like she hadn’t even realized what it had been up to, then lowered it uneasily.  Her nursing credentials were solid if somewhat newly minted, and she was so new to the military she was still trying to go by the book every step of the way.  She’d learn, though.  She’d probably learn much faster here than just about anywhere else apart from a war zone.  Hell, sometimes this place felt like a war zone.

Janet decided to go easy on the poor woman – just this once.  “Here,” she said, handing Clark a pair of bandage scissors.  “You may as well finish what you started yesterday.”  She gestured at the cut running up Daniel’s shirt.  Clark took the scissors and reached for Daniel’s shirt without saying another word.

This at least got a reaction out of Daniel.  Even though he was obviously exhausted, a hint of color crept into his cheeks as he raised a hand in protest.  “That’s okay.  I don’t think I need any help getting undressed.”

Christ.  Why did everything have to be a fight with him?  Okay, so it had just about knocked her composure for a loop when he hadn’t protested the needle in his arm, but why did he have to get feisty now?  “It’s not open for debate, Daniel.  You can hardly even sit up on your own.  Let Clark do her job, and you can concentrate on telling me how you feel.”

He stared at her for a few seconds before he lowered his hand and allowed Clark to apply the scissors to his shirt.  He kept his eyes carefully averted from what the nurse was doing, though.  “I feel like crap.”

Janet laughed a little and was surprised to find the weight lifting just slightly from the center of her chest.  She started to help Daniel slip his arms into a hospital gown and said, “Well, that’s a little generic.  Could you be more specific?  Any pain, nausea, dizziness?”

He paused a moment as if evaluating himself, very studiously ignoring Clark, who had moved down to his pants.  “Yes to all of the above, except for the pain.  That’s mostly gone now.”  He seemed surprised even as he said it.  Surprised and very, very relieved.

“Okay, so where was the pain?”

“Everywhere,” he said quietly, and the memory of it was so sharp in his eyes that she had to force herself not to look away.  “And no, I can’t be more specific.  It really did hurt everywhere.  But it’s okay now.  I’m just sore.  Achy.  Tired.  My arm’s still numb.”

“Okay.  We’ll get that checked out.  You just rest now.”  She gently squeezed his shoulder.  “I’ll wake you up when it’s time for all those wonderful tests you love so much.  I wouldn’t want you to miss the fun.”


	7. Crash and Burn

Janet rubbed absently at her temple, willing the headache to go away.  She should’ve gone sooner to have that cigarette.  There was no way she was going to get the time to have one now, not for a while.

She looked at the preliminary test results one more time, checked the monitors one more time, took another look at Daniel – sleeping, but far from peacefully.  His breathing was a little labored, and every now and then he would twitch, slight tremors jerking along limbs that couldn’t seem to find a comfortable position to rest themselves.

The sound of feet pounding down the hallway distracted her.  Sam appeared in the doorway, a little out of breath, her cheeks flushed, eyes bright, a grin threatening to crack her face.  “I came as soon as I heard.  Where is he?  Is he okay?”  And then she saw him.  Her face fell.  Crashed, really.  “Oh, no.”  She walked very slowly over to the bed, the color leaching out of her cheeks and the bounce gone from her steps – looked at Daniel, then up at Janet, then back at Daniel again.  Her hands gripped the rails of the bed so hard her knuckles stood out sharply.

Janet stared at those hands, knowing exactly how Sam felt – clenched fists, fingernails digging into palms, muscles twisting into aching knots.   She tried to offer a reassuring smile, but the appropriate muscles refused to cooperate.  Instead, she gestured Sam toward her office, and Sam reluctantly went.  Janet closed the door, but left it cracked a bit so she could still hear what was going on outside.  She wished she could shut the door, but it was too late for that.

“Sit,” she said.  It was half a suggestion and half an order, half friendship and half doctor’s authority.

Sam either took the advice or obeyed the order.  It any event, she sagged down into the chair, but then sat up straight, her shoulders stiff and her hands clenched in her lap.  “The Colonel’s in a meeting with General Hammond, but I’m sure he’ll be down as soon as he can.”

“All right.”  Just as well he wasn’t here yet.  This was the sort of thing Colonel O’Neill would have no patience for – maddeningly elusive enemies, half-seen answers, vague possibilities.  “In the meantime, maybe you could help me figure something out.  According to Daniel, he didn’t just disappear.  He insists he traveled forward in time three days and there was something he thinks was a bomb about to go off right here in the infirmary.  It was similar in size and appearance to the object he touched on 549.  Now, we know time travel is possible, but it took a wormhole trip in conjunction with a solar flare.  How could an object so small account for what he says happened to him?”

Sam frowned and massaged the back of her neck with one hand.  Her voice was faint at first, but gathered strength as she went.  “Well, as I was telling the Colonel, the size of the object is puzzling in that it would have to be channeling massive amounts of energy, but if what I’m thinking is correct, we’re dealing with tachyons.”

“Tachyons,” Janet repeated.

“Yes, hypothetical particles that travel faster than the speed of light.”  Sam took a deep breath and plunged ahead.  “A lot of the tachyon theories are related to time travel.  It’s possible the artifact Daniel touched is some kind of tachyon generator.  But it would take massive amounts of energy to actually create tachyons, so the device would have to be buffered somehow or it would’ve blown us all to kingdom come.  Wait a minute.”  A wash of excitement splashed across her face.  “You said he thought he saw a bomb here in the infirmary?”

“Yes.”  Janet wasn’t sure where Sam was going with this, but for some reason, the turn of questioning lifted her spirits.  When Sam got that look in her eyes and started asking questions like this, she usually ended up finding an answer of some sort, or at least a hypothesis.

“What if it wasn’t a bomb at all?  What if it was something we found – will find – are about to find on 549?  The Colonel is talking to General Hammond about going back to see if we can find anything to help us figure out what happened.  Maybe what Daniel saw is really some kind of device to negate the tachyons.  Maybe we were trying to get him back.  He must’ve been saturated with tachyons, or at least enough to throw him forward into the future a few days.  Then he was exposed to this other device.  It neutralized the tachyons, but ended up throwing him back in time in the process.  Or maybe there were just enough tachyons left afterwards to send him back to today.”  She broke off as she turned her head toward the door, then stood up abruptly and went out into the infirmary.

Janet remained sitting where she was, her elbows propped on the desk’s surface, her fingers steepled and pressed against her lips.  Yes, of course.  That was Sam, ever the scientist, wanting to know all the facts that could possibly be known.  She fiddled with the MALP equipment for a few minutes, then came back into the office and sat down again.  “I’m still picking up indications of tachyons in the immediate area,” she said in a voice that struggled to remain detached – and succeeded, for the moment, “but Daniel’s clear.  He’s not going anywhere.”

“No, I don’t believe he is,” Janet said, feeling the sting of something that wasn’t quite tears in the corners of her eyes.

“He _is_ going to be all right, isn’t he?”

There was nothing in the world she wanted more at that moment than to say yes.  “I don’t really know for certain.  His arm is still numb, and there’s some redness and slight swelling, but I can’t find any apparent cause for it.  It’s not a burn, and there aren’t any fractures or contusions.  We may be dealing with nerve damage, but I can’t be sure of the cause or whether it’s permanent.  We’re in the process of running tests.  The preliminary results are inconclusive.  He’s in some pain, a bit nauseous, his blood pressure’s lower than normal, and his red blood cell count is down slightly.  That’s not enough to make a diagnosis.”

They were both silent for a moment, Sam bowing her head to stare at her hands, now still and twisted tightly together in her lap.  Janet found herself fixated once more on those hands, her own gut clenching in sympathy, then doing a flip-flop as Sam’s head suddenly jerked back up and she whispered, “Oh no.”

Janet felt her heart sinking.  She had been hoping for some kind of positive theory from Sam, but the grim expression on her face told her she wasn’t going to get it.  Forget about the cigarette.  She didn’t want a drink, either.  She just wanted to lay her head down on her desk and cry.  “Sam?”

“I–  I just realized.  To neutralize tachyons, you’d have to add a hell of a lot of energy of some kind, and for such a small device to produce that kind of energy–  The energy could very well could be nuclear in origin.”  As soon as she said those last few words, she shut her mouth and clamped her lips tightly shut.

The words were a bellows pumping life into the bank of coals in the pit of Janet’s stomach.  “Radiation…”  She said it softly, tentatively, one of those words like “cancer” that no one ever wants to say very loudly, as if merely speaking its name will summon it.  “That would fit the symptoms he’s exhibiting so far.”  Her mind raced ahead through the horribly grim list of side effects yet to come.

“Then you’ll treat him for that?”  Sam’s expression was hopeful, but Janet knew it was a paper-thin façade.

So they had a theory, a possible answer.  But it was far from comforting.  Jagged with sharp edges, painful and bitter.  “There isn’t really a treatment for radiation exposure itself.  You treat the symptoms and rely on the body’s own healing mechanisms to pull the patient through.  We’ll have to wait and see.”  Her instincts were now insisting on telling her it would take a miracle.  Damn it.  She believed in miracles.  She’d seen them with her own eyes, but she also knew they didn’t appear on command, no matter how much you wished and hoped and prayed for them.  Usually, they came soaked with blood and sweat and tears and looked an awful lot like plain old stubbornness and sheer determination.  She was ready to be stubborn.  She would have to be.  They would all have to be.

* * * * *

Sam’s lab.  Sam’s desk.  Sam’s computer, Sam’s piles of books and papers and scientific equipment thingies.  But no Sam.  Jack sighed.  Time to go and play “Find the Captain.”  As he turned to head for the nearest female captain hiding place – ladies’ washroom down the hall – he ran smack into her.  “Hey, I didn’t call ollie ollie oxenfree.”

“Sorry, Sir.”  She paused and frowned at him.  “What on earth are you talking about?  Never mind.  Daniel’s back.”

It took him a couple of seconds to register what she’d just said – the last part, the important part.  “Daniel’s… back?  As in, ‘back’ back?  Back here?”

She nodded.  He would’ve expected a big, goofy grin on her face, but the smile was subdued.  “Yes.  He’s in the infirmary.”

Damn.  Daniel and the infirmary – not a good combination.  Then again, it could just be that Doc Fraiser was poking him full of holes to make sure he really was back and really was himself.  Please let that be it.  He didn’t ask Sam.  He didn’t want to know right at the moment.  He needed a few minutes – alone – to switch tracks, to collect himself.  A few minutes he could get by walking to the infirmary, and then he could see for himself.  Seeing is believing.  He nodded at her, short and sharp, and stepped towards the door.  She didn’t get the message, though.

“Sir.  There are a couple of things I need to tell you.  It’s important.”  The tone of her voice was apologetic.  Maybe she _did_ get the message after all.  Which made whatever she had to say not just important but very important.  He turned back towards her and waited for the blow to come.  “It looks like my theory about the tachyons was right.  Daniel says he was thrown into the future, three days from now, to this Friday.  He even looked at the clock and the calendar.  Then he got knocked back here.”

“Oh.  Okay.”  It didn’t even phase him.  Sam’s theory was correct.  Daniel was back where he belonged.  All was well with the world.  Then again, maybe not.  “And?”

“And…  Well, Sir, he says there was – will be – a bomb.  In the infirmary.  He was getting so worked up about it before I went down there, Janet had to sedate him.  He was still asleep when I left, but he might be awake now.”

“Oh, for cryin’ out–”  Great.  Just wonderful.  A security breach.  And why the hell did Janet’s solution for everything have to come in a syringe?  No.  That wasn’t fair.  He drew himself up, squared his shoulders.  He could deal with this.  Well, maybe not Janet, but the security breach.  “Okay, I’ll go down and talk to him, see if I can get to the bottom of this.”  He started to leave, but she stopped him again.

“Sir.  I’m sorry.  There’s one other thing you should know.”  That’s what he was afraid of.  He waited.  She opened her mouth, closed it again.  Took a deep breath.  “Did General Hammond give us permission to go back to 549?”

Now it was his turn to wonder what on earth she was talking about.  “Yes, as a matter of fact he did, but I don’t see the point now Daniel’s back.”

“We still need to go back.  Dr. Fraiser thinks Daniel was exposed to some kind of radiation.  We don’t know exactly what kind or how much.  Or what kind of… damage… might ultimately result.”

He felt like he’d been kicked headfirst out of a perfectly good airplane.  Freefall from 10,000 feet.  _Okay, Jack.  Keep it pulled together.  Don’t look down._   “Okay.  Time out.  Back up.  You’re telling me that Daniel took a little trip a few days into the future and got himself zapped by radiation?  What are we talking about here?  Nukes?  Or what?”

“No, Sir.  I very much doubt that.  Janet said he described the object as similar to the device he touched on 549.  I know this sounds kind of crazy, Sir, but I think we might’ve brought it back here.  To clear the remaining tachyons, maybe.  We have to go back and find it.”

Forget about skydiving.  This was rapidly turning into some kind of _Twilight Zone_ episode from hell.  “You didn’t tell me there was any danger from the leftover tachyons.  Are we going to have more people taking unscheduled trips off into the future?”

“I really don’t know for certain, Sir.  It’s possible.  I mean, there must’ve been some reason we felt the need to neutralize the remaining tachyons.  If that’s what we were doing.  Will be doing.  I mean–”  She paused, shook her head, held out one hand with fingers splayed.  “Look, bottom line, I don’t know what it was Daniel saw or exactly what happened to him, but we have to find out.”

The mixture of determination and desperation in her eyes made his stomach flip over.  Back to the freefall, this time accompanied by the horrors of nuclear weapons without the bang.  On a smaller scale, the scale of one human life.  Daniel’s life.  “Okay.  Go find Teal’c and get geared up.  And tell Hammond everything you just told me.  I’m going to see Daniel, and then we’re going back to 549.”


	8. Deja Vu

The few minutes it took Jack to walk to the infirmary – he had to keep reminding himself to walk, even though he really wanted to run – were enough for him to get his heartbeat and breathing rate back to normal.  The acid was still churning in his stomach, though.  Daniel really was going to give him an ulcer one of these days.  One of these days…  He pushed the thought aside, not caring one bit for where it was leading.

Daniel was here now, alive and – not so well.  Christ.  He looked really crappy.  Like someone had twisted him up and wrung him out and tossed him on the garbage heap.  Dark circles under the eyes, white as a ghost, the whole nine yards.

His eyes were open.  For one gut-wrenching moment, Jack imagined he was looking at a corpse.  But the corpse blinked, then spoke.

“Jack.  Thank God.  Am I ever glad to see you.”  He was trying to push himself up on his elbow.

“Hey, don’t get up on my account.”  He walked over to the bed and pulled the pillow out from where it was pinned beneath Daniel’s shoulder, fluffed it up and tucked it back under his head.  “That’s better.”  He leaned forwards and made a show of looking side to side suspiciously.  “Just don’t tell any of the nurses I did that.  They all think I’m a hardass.”

“Sure,” Daniel said, not seeming to register that Jack was joking.  “Whatever you say.  But I have to tell you about the bomb.”

“Yeah, Carter mentioned that to me.  Here in the infirmary.  On Friday, right?”

Daniel frowned at him, sank a little deeper into the pillow.  But his eyes were still active, alert, restless.  “Right.  You don’t believe me either, do you?”

If only it were as simple as believing or not believing.  He grabbed a chair, swung it around and straddled it backwards.  “It’s not that I don’t believe you.  Yeah, it sounds a little strange, but that’s pretty much par for the course in this place.  The time travel thing, okay.  Been there, done that.  That was a pretty spectacular disappearing act you pulled on us, so I’ll give you that one.  This bomb, though.  You sure that’s what it was?”

“Yes.  Well, maybe.  It had a timer attached to it.”

That was a wrinkle Sam hadn’t mentioned.  Not really all that important, though.  At least not for what he was trying to accomplish at the moment.  Sometimes, Janet might be justified in grabbing for the needle first and asking questions later, but not with Daniel.  Not this time anyway.  Right now, Daniel needed words.  Linguistic Valium.  “And this timer… was ticking?”

“Yes, it was.  All the way down to zero.”

“Zero, huh?  And you stood there and watched it?”  Looked like Sam was right that it wasn’t a bomb.  Daniel sure didn’t look like someone who’d had a bomb blow up in his face.  He looked bad, yeah, but not that bad.  Not quite.  Jack wanted him to reason it through for himself, though.  Much more effective than trying to tell him something he wasn’t ready to hear.

“No, I didn’t just stand there and watch it.  I tried to find some help, but there was no one there and the blast doors were sealed.”  He was getting angry now, but still holding it together.  That just might be productive.  Get the ol’ adrenaline going.  “I was going to try and defuse it.”

Whoa!  Another wrinkle.  A surprising one.  That took a lot of guts – or a lot of stupidity.  Or just plain impulsiveness.  “And?”

“And what?”

“Did you defuse it?”

The anger was turning to frustration.  His brains really must’ve been scrambled by whatever had happened to him if he wasn’t getting it yet.  “No, I didn’t defuse it, Jack.  I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to defuse a bomb.  Setting them off, yes, but not defusing.  Besides, there wasn’t enough time.”

“So it went off?”  This was really beginning to bother Jack.  He wanted to yell at Daniel to figure it out already, but Daniel never yelled at _him_ when _he_ was being dense.  Well, almost never.

“Yes, it went off.  I already told you that.”

“And you were standing there when it happened?”

“Yes.  Come on, Jack, what is this?  Twenty questions?  Do I have to spell it out for you?  There was – is – will be – a bomb.  Here.  On Friday.  This Friday.  And it went off.”  He was staring at Jack, a slight hint of color in his cheeks.  Jack just stared back.  He was a smart kid.  Let him figure it out.  C’mon, Daniel.  Please figure it out.  “And I’m still here.”  _Bingo!_   “If it were a bomb, I’d be dead.”  Jack barely managed to suppress a wince at that comment.  He might still be dead, bomb or no bomb.  “Okay, so it wasn’t a bomb.  What was it, then?”

Jack shrugged.  “No idea.”  Not strictly true, but they were just guessing at this point.  Daniel didn’t need to worry about it until they knew for sure.  “That’s why we’re going back to 549.”  Also not completely true.  Half truth.  Better than no truth.  “So you’re going to stay right here and be a good patient for Doctor Fraiser – just like you always are – and we’ll go dig up some nice, juicy, squiggly lines and stuff for you to squint at.  Okay?”

Daniel blinked at him for a moment, then slowly nodded and leaned back into the pillows.  There was an uncomfortable silence, then the sound of approaching footsteps pulled Daniel’s eyes toward the door.  “Hey, Sam.  Teal’c.”

Jack turned around.  He figured Sam would bring Teal’c down here to see Daniel, but he hadn’t expected them so soon.  She must’ve given Hammond the executive summary on the fly.

Teal’c and Sam exchanged a few words with Daniel, “glad you’re okay’s” all around.  Sam was putting up a good show, but Teal’c seemed a bit uneasy.  She must’ve filled him in on the way down.  Fortunately, Daniel didn’t seem to notice anything amiss.  He must’ve been thoroughly drained by their debate over the bomb… non-bomb… whatever it was.  He looked like he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.  As much as it unsettled Jack that it was taking so little to wear Daniel out, he was glad he’d be getting some rest while they were gone.

He motioned to Sam and Teal’c that it was time to go, but Sam was staring wide-eyed in Daniel’s direction.  Jack spun back around, barely hearing her whispered, “Oh no!”  His heart did a two-step as he saw that Daniel was still there, but right next to him, surrounding the IV stand, the air was distorting, the same way it had when he’d disappeared yesterday.

There was a flash.  Jack’s heart completely skipped a beat.  He blinked.  Blinked again to clear his vision.

Daniel was blinking back at him, holding up his arm, a trickle of fresh blood where the IV cannula had been.  “Jack?  What just happened?”

He couldn’t answer for a few seconds.  Couldn’t move.  Sam found her tongue a fraction of a second before he managed to unglue his from the roof of his mouth.

“It’s okay, Daniel,” she said, sounding a lot more calm and certain than she looked.  “I was picking up some residual tachyon effects in the area.  This must be the result of that.  There weren’t any in you, though.”  She stepped quickly over to the MALP equipment package.  It had been pushed into the corner and deactivated, but a flip of a switch brought it humming back to life.  She frowned in concentration as her eyes skimmed over the readouts.  “There seems to be a slight increase in the tachyon traces in the area, but still nothing actually in Daniel.”

“And we’re going to keep it that way,” Jack added.  “Carter, go tell Doctor Fraiser what just happened.  She might want to consider implementing that infirmary evac plan.  We don’t want to take any chances.  I’ll give the General a heads-up, and then we’re getting our butts back to 549 to find a way to stop this before it gets completely out of hand.”

* * * * *

P4J549.  Jack had never much cared for offices or labs, and this was an alien office and lab rolled into one.  And there were things in it that bit, apart from blonde captains.  He really hadn’t been kidding when he warned her not to touch anything unless she was sure of what it was.  Teal’c he didn’t need to worry about.  Teal’c wasn’t exactly a touchy feely kind of guy – Jaffa – whatever.  He was obediently confining himself to looking and nudging the occasional scrap of paper out of the way with his staff weapon.  Jack followed suit, using the business end of his rifle.

All things considered, there were lots of places he’d rather be than here.  It was too damn quiet.  And empty, but with the signs of past activity all around.  Abandoned.  It gave him the creeps.  He’d even take a military cocktail party over this.  Or a week of maneuvers crammed inside a tank with a couple of DATs who hadn’t bathed for a month.  At least those were things he could understand, even if they did leave a bad taste in his mouth.  Heebie jeebies and lack of intel were never a good mix.  Sometimes it could be downright volatile.  Sometimes it just bit you in the ass and went on its merry way.

Fortunately, this time, nothing seemed to want to munch on either him or his team.  He gave an especially wide berth to an object that bore more than a passing resemblance to the “bomb” Daniel had described.  If Sam was right, it could very well be what had caused his current… condition.

They regrouped back at the ‘Gate two hours later, Sam holding a suspiciously terrestrial-looking video camera in one hand and a sheaf of rumpled papers in the other.  “Notes?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow.

“I hope so,” she replied as she tucked the pile carefully into her backpack.  Wouldn’t want to make a paper blizzard through the wormhole.  The way their luck was going lately, they’d end up getting pulled over by the Ancients and fined for littering.  She pulled the video camera back out from under her arm, where she’d tucked it while securing the notes.  “I also found Daniel’s video camera.  He must’ve dropped it when he got zapped.  I know this sounds really strange, Sir, but I’m getting the weirdest feeling of deja vu about this.  I mean, I wasn’t at all surprised to find it.  I even felt like I knew exactly where it would be.”

“Like right next to the place he got zapped?”  He’d been getting that funny rerun feeling, too, but he wasn’t about to open the door and let that particular boogey man in.  He could just freeze his keester off outside with the rest of the myths and legends.  “Besides, Daniel’s always forgetting things.  He lost his glasses on top of his head once.  He’d lose his head if it wasn’t attached to his body.  And he’d just had the crap knocked out of him at the time, if you recall.”

“Right.  Of course.  I just–”

“Never mind, Captain.”  He was starting to get annoyed, but he wasn’t sure why, which annoyed him even more.  Time to cut off this feedback loop before it got out of hand.  “Let’s just take the camera and the notes and get out of here.  And no, we’re not taking any alien thingamajigs back with us, so don’t even think of asking.”

“How did you know what I was thinking?”

This was really starting to get on his nerves.  “Because I know you, Captain.  Look, I say ‘no,’ and General Hammond most definitely said ‘no’ to collecting souvenirs when he gave me the go-ahead to come back here.  I think I’ll go out on a limb and make an exception for paper.  That’s gotta be pretty much harmless.  No one’s ever died from a paper cut.”

“That we know of.”

He’d been heading for the DHD, fully intending to do the honors of getting them the heck out of Dodge himself, but he stopped and turned back toward her at this remark.  Sam?  Making a pessimistic comment?  Her earlier smart aleck response to his no touching decree he could deal with, but pessimism?  “I think you’ve been spending entirely too much time around me, Captain.”

“So you’ve told me.”

All right.  This wasn’t just starting to get on his nerves.  It was officially on his nerves.  “No I haven’t.  I’ve never said that before.”  He really wasn’t sure if he had or hadn’t, but he didn’t care.

“Yes, you have.”

On his nerves and starting to grate.  “Have not.”

“Have too.”

Just how far could nerves stretch before they snapped?  “Okay, when?”  Screw it.  Enough.  That’d just get her started again.  “Never mind.  I take it back. I think Daniel’s the one you’ve been spending too much time around.”

“And I hope to spend a whole lot more time around him, Sir.”  Her tone ricocheted into wistfulness with a suddenness that made his nerves cringe.

“So do I, Captain.  So do I.”


	9. Butterflies in Hong Kong

Daniel was dead tired, but he couldn’t sleep or even keep his eyes closed for more than a few minutes at a time.  When he tried, the memory of waking up alone in the infirmary would flash through his mind, or he would see the timer again, ticking down its final seconds.  And it was just too dang noisy in here.  They’d barely gotten him settled in a bed in the corner of the storage room where they’d relocated the infirmary when the customers started rolling in. The number of injuries was simply incredible.  Mostly minor, thank God – he didn’t know what he’d do with himself if someone ended up seriously injured – but add them all up, and you got one hell of a snowball effect.  Everyone was on edge, jumping at their shadows, jumping down each other’s throats, jumping on gurneys to be bandaged or stitched or splinted.

It was all his fault.  If he hadn’t touched that damn thing to begin with, none of this would be happening.  He was just about ready to believe that theory Sam had once told him about the butterfly flapping its wings in Hong Kong.  That one touch had led to a hell of a whirlwind.

And there was Sam now, blown back in from P4J549.  She was standing in the doorway, waving at him and holding up a folder tantalizingly stuffed with paper.  He wanted to wave back, but one arm was encumbered with an IV and the other was still numb.  He made do with a nod and an exaggerated smile instead.

She took a few steps in his direction, but Janet waylaid her and pulled her out into the hall.  He had a feeling he knew what the gist of that conversation was – he’d caught Janet looking at him a couple of times over the past hour with a painfully raw expression on her face.  It was bad, but he really didn’t want to know.  Not yet.  And Janet didn’t seem to be in any hurry to tell him.  Just kept reassuring him they were still working on a diagnosis and it wouldn’t be too long before they had some answers.

Oh, good.  Sam was coming to rescue him from morbid thoughts, and Janet was following along behind… pushing a wheelchair?  What?  Was she actually going to let him out of here?  He was amazed by the sudden rush of energy the thought gave him.  He even managed to sit up under his own steam, but that turned out to be a bad move.  He felt like someone had knocked him upside the head and kicked him in the gut at the same time.

Janet abandoned the wheelchair and was on him in a flash, pulling his eyelids back – at least she didn’t shine that horrible light in his eyes again – and telling him to follow her finger with his eyes.  “It’s okay,” he protested.  “Just a head rush.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have sat up so fast,” she scolded him, but she let it go at that and went to retrieve the wheelchair without further commentary.

He turned his attention back to Sam.  “So, did you come to spring me from jail?”

“Not exactly.  Janet’s a regular Scrooge when it comes to granting parole.  She set up a nice, private little suite for you right next door, though.  That way, we can have some peace and quiet for this.”  She handed him the folder.  “A translation project.  That is, if you feel up to it…”

Her voice trailed off.  Damn.  He’d thought that look was a Janet exclusive, but Sam did a very good imitation.  He really wished people would quit looking at him like that.  He was beginning to feel like a sideshow – or a train wreck – maybe a little of both.  He muttered, “Yes, of course I feel up to it,” then busied himself by flipping through the wild variety of bits and pieces of paper in the folder while Janet unhooked the monitoring paraphernalia.  She left the IV, though.  Damn.  But at least it would save him from being stuck again later.

“And before you get too excited,” Janet put in, an attempt at humor obviously forced into her voice, “all of this is going with you.  We’ll get you hooked back up next door.”

“Oh, just great.”  Oh well.  At least he’d have something to do now.  Wait a minute.  He’d intended looking at the folder’s contents to be a diversion, a way to not look at Sam without being rude, but now–  “This is Ancient script.  Well, it’s a variation of Ancient script, actually.  But it’s close.  Very close.  Maybe some kind of dialect or an offshoot.”

Janet slipped a robe around him, and he had to close the folder and hand it back to Sam while he scooted out of the bed.  He thought he could manage it by himself, but he was wrong.  It was a good thing Janet knew better, or he’d be surrendering what remained of his dignity right now.  She somehow managed to support what must’ve been most of his weight – he certainly didn’t feel like he was holding much of it up himself – and got him settled in the wheelchair with an absolute minimum of fuss.  Thank God for people who knew better and had the sense and reflexes to use the knowledge.

He closed his eyes.  A faint floral and citrus scent wafted across his face as he felt the smooth surface of the folder being slipped back under his hands.  Sam’s voice was very soft next to his ear.  “Okay, Daniel.  Let’s go and get you settled.”

He nodded, then opened his eyes and went back to leafing through the file again.  “Maybe you should see if you can spring McConnell, too.  He’s really got a knack for this stuff.  He’s down there getting his ankle wrapped up.”  Without looking up, he jerked his thumb in the general direction where he’d last seen McConnell.  What he didn’t want to say, was trying very hard not to admit even to himself, was that he didn’t think he had the strength to tackle this project without some assistance.

There was a pause.  He could feel Sam’s eyes on the back of his head, sending a shiver across his shoulders and raising the hairs along his neck.  “Okay.  Sure,” she said. “That’s a good idea.”

He went back to shuffling through the pieces of paper, but he didn’t really see what he was looking at.  He was too distracted by the looming presence of every person they passed, mutters he didn’t want to hear and silence that was even more difficult to ignore.  When they finally got out into the hallway, he heaved a sigh of relief and looked up.  Thank God there wasn’t anyone there to look back at him.  Small miracles.  Sometimes that was all you could hope for.

* * * * *

Oh, no.  Janet again.  Daniel groaned and let his head flop back against the pillow.  It was bad enough he had to put up with all the monitoring equipment – the wires from the EKG snaking their way under the hospital gown, the pulse oximeter on his finger getting in the way every time he tried to turn a page or pick up a pencil, the continuous blood pressure monitor squeezing the heck out of his arm every few minutes, and a damn IV stuck in both arms now.  Combine all of that with the fact he was having to take breaks more and more frequently, and he felt like he was making hardly any headway in the translations at all.  McConnell was shouldering most of the burden, and Sam was very tactfully trying not to notice.  He was so incredibly frustrated he wanted to scream, but he didn’t think he quite had the energy to spare for that.

And now Janet was back again, holding a tray of – oh no – it looked like food.  Just the thought made him nauseous.  He swallowed and turned his head away.

“Okay, guys, how about you let Daniel rest for a couple of hours.”

He felt the squeeze of Sam’s hand on his shoulder as she said, “We’ll be back soon.”  He nodded, but didn’t look at her.  The door opened, and the low-level hum of activity in the adjacent room came clearly to his ears for a few seconds.  The noises had grown gradually softer over the last several hours as the number of injuries decreased. The base personnel were apparently adjusting to the upheaval, learning to be hyper-cautious, leaving assumption behind whenever they went into the Bermuda Triangle in the lower levels.  Now life was carrying on in a kind of off-kilter fashion, accompanied by the shuffling of paper, the muted percussion of footsteps, the rustle and clink and clatter of medical equipment and supplies being cleared away, thrown away, stored away.

The door clicked shut, and he was left alone with Janet and something that smelled like chicken noodle soup.  “You don’t seriously think you’re going to try and get me to eat that.”

“Actually, yes.  I thought I might give it another try.”

He sighed and turned to look at her.  Her expression was carefully schooled into that soothing doctor mode that annoyed the hell out of him.  He really shouldn’t be angry at her, though.  She was trying very hard, and he wasn’t exactly making it any easier.  “I couldn’t keep anything down last time, Janet, not even water.  I’m tired of throwing up.”

“I know.”  She set the tray down on a table against the wall and came over to sit next to him in the chair Sam had vacated.

“Haven’t you got me hooked up to enough IV stuff to make up for it?”  He glared downwards and turned and lifted his forearms slightly, either to get a morbid look at the cannulas entering his flesh or to show her what she already knew was there. Either option was stupid, and he quickly rested his arms back at his sides again.

“I know it’s not very comfortable, Daniel, but we have to keep the transfusions going to replace the blood volume you’re losing due to the radiation exposure.”  Damn, he hated the sound of that word.  Radiation.  He hadn’t liked the queasy feeling it had given him when she’d finally admitted to him it was a distinct possibility, and he certainly didn’t like it any better now that he was getting more intimate with it.

Radiation.  From the Latin _radiare_.  To emit beams.  Same root as radiant.  Radiance.  Both perfectly nice words.  But add a different suffix and you got something else entirely.

Janet had gone on speaking as if the word didn’t affect her at all.  Hah.  It really didn’t.  Not like it was affecting him.  “We have to have a dedicated line for the transfusions, and we need the other line for the meds, plus fluids to keep you hydrated.  It would still be better if you could eat something, though.”

Oh, yeah, like it was just that easy.  He knew it wasn’t at all fair to take his frustrations out on her, but it still took some effort to keep from snapping at her.  He just barely managed to keep his tone on the side of civil.  “Well, I’m sorry, but it’s not going to happen.  You can just go ahead and stick me all you want.  I doubt you can mangle me any worse than I already am.”  He glanced pointedly at the pressure bandages around both arms below the IV sites, purple bruising creeping out around the edges.

“That’s a side effect of the radiation, Daniel.  The blood starts to lose its ability to clot, but the blood tests are essential in assessing your condition so we can adjust the treatment as needed.  Which brings me to the other reason I’m here.  How’s the pain?”

“Not too bad.”  She didn’t say anything, just peered at him in a fashion that he interpreted as challenging.  She was assessing him right now, trying to decide if he was telling the truth.  He was really too tired to keep up this verbal sparring.  “Okay, it’s gotten a little worse.”

She nodded once, apparently satisfied with the veracity of his answer.  “I’ll increase the dosage of morphine again.  There’s other things we can try, too, if that’s not working.  Dilaudid might be a good alternative.  It often works when morphine doesn’t.  Just let me know, okay?  There’s no reason for you to be in pain.”  He clenched his jaw to keep from laughing.  No reason other than his body being eaten alive from the inside out.  “There’s other anti-emetics we can try for the nausea, too.  And I’m going to add IV antibiotics.  You’re running a low-grade fever.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”  He closed his eyes and leaned back, blowing out a huge breath of frustration.  On top of all that, the red patches on his right arm were beginning to darken, and they’d had to restart the IV on that side three times now.  Even though Janet hadn’t brought it up directly, he’d noticed her looking very carefully at that arm.  “Look, I really don’t want to talk about this any more.  Do whatever you think needs to be done.”

“I just want you to be informed.”

She said it very softly and gently, but for some reason, it rubbed him the wrong way.  Maybe it was just that he was trying so hard to stay calm and alert while working on the translations with Sam and McConnell that he didn’t have any patience left.  Maybe it was just that he was fed up with being poked and prodded and examined.  Maybe he was afraid of facing what it all meant.  “Just tell me one thing, Janet.  Am I going to die?”  There.  He’d said it.  But he didn’t feel any better.  No relief at getting it out in the open, and it didn’t matter what her answer was. His body already knew; it was already giving up.

She was silent for a moment, and he opened his eyes to look at her.  He immediately regretted doing so.  That pained expression that he’d already caught glimpses of had turned her face into a rigid mask.  The truth, what she really thought, was screaming behind the mask, but she said in a carefully neutral voice, “I don’t know, Daniel.  The progression of your symptoms has confirmed that we’re dealing with radiation exposure, but we still don’t know what kind of radiation or the dosage you received.”

Dosage.  What a perfect doctor word.  Latin _dosis_.  To give.  Her entire response was a perfectly noncommittal doctor answer, but he sensed a streak of stubbornness there too.  She wasn’t about to give in.  She wasn’t avoiding the truth.  Desperate hopes, hanging on by fingernails, anything but just letting it happen.  He was right there along with her for the moment, but he wasn’t at all sure how much longer he could keep it up.


	10. Poems and Other Last-Ditch Efforts

There it was, written down in black and white, in the deceptively beautiful flourish of an alien hand.  Confirmation of all the guesses.  It wasn’t a bomb, but it was definitely radioactive – very radioactive and very deadly.  The end result would be the same.  It would just take a little more time.  So much effort for what amounted to a death sentence.

Staring at it didn’t make it change.  Daniel doubted that staring ever accomplished anything other than getting people into fights.  He laid the piece of paper down on his lap, then pushed his glasses up onto the top of his head.  It had taken some doing, but he’d finally managed to get all the tubing and wires arranged and taped so that he had a decent range of motion with one arm.  The other arm had completely lost all sensation a while ago, which was probably a good thing.  Between yet another blown vein and the gradual darkening of tissues fried by radiation, it would probably hurt like hell if he could feel it.  As it was, his shoulder constantly ached no matter how he shifted himself.

He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed gently at his eyelids with forefinger and thumb.  Others might have tried to hide what was on that piece of paper from him, but not Sam.  She couldn’t keep the truth hidden away once she knew it for what it was.  It simply wasn’t in her personality and beliefs, and it certainly wasn’t in their friendship.

“There has to be something we’re missing.”  Good ol’ Sam, refusing to give up.  She wouldn’t hide from the facts, but sometimes she refused to believe they were telling her the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  Puzzles didn’t have straight borders for her.  There was always something else to be added, some way to change the picture, to add to it, to flip the perspective on its head.

“Like what?”  He opened his eyes and looked at her, focusing on her so he could avoid sparing any attention for McConnell.  McConnell with that annoying, terrifying, sympathetic, gut-wrenching, oh-so-human look on his face.  The look of giving up hope, of being faced with defeat.  Daniel wished he would stop it, but McConnell had too much heart in him, so there was no point in asking.  “We’ve been through it all over and over again.  We’re about as sure of the translations as we can possibly be.”

“Maybe we missed something.  Maybe there’s some more notes I didn’t pick up.”

“Sam.”  He reached over and squeezed her arm.  It cost him a lot of effort, but it was worth it.  She was worth it.  “I’m sure you got everything.  You got more than everything.  Some of this has nothing to do with what we’re looking for.  We’ve even got some poetry in here.”  He nodded at the sheet he’d set aside to look at again later.  It was strangely beautiful and comforting to him, even though it didn’t make any kind of literal sense.  Dancing in the sun…

“Daniel?”  He pulled his attention back to Sam.  He’d been drifting again.  Somewhere…  She was holding up the creased and yellowed sheet with the lines of fading poetry.  “The handwriting on this one.  It’s different from the other ones, isn’t it?  I mean, it was written by a different person.”

“Yes.  Yes, it was.  I’m surprised you picked up on that.  The differences are very subtle.  I didn’t even see it right away.  What does that matter, though?  It’s only poetry.”

“Only as true as we would believe.”  There was a distant look in her eyes.

His curiosity was piqued.  Apparently, that part of him absolutely refused to listen to any messages his body was sending out.  “What?”

“Hmm?  Oh.  Nothing.  Just an old song.”  She was staring hard at the piece of paper, as if she were trying to will it to give up its secrets.  “What if this person didn’t speak the same language?  I mean, as a native language.  Like with math.  Base eight, base ten, base sixteen.  The base affects the outcome.  What if this is – I don’t know – a different dialect or something?  Wouldn’t that affect the translation?”

Now McConnell was getting back into the game.  He leaned forwards into Daniel’s field of vision, his face alive with an intense expression of cogs-and-wheels-turning concentration.  “Yes, it certainly would have an effect, maybe a significant one.  Doctor Jackson, do you still have that CD-ROM you let me borrow last month?  The one with all of the Latin derivations and variations?”

“Yes.  Yes, it’s in my office.”  There was a sudden influx of animation filtering into his system, propelled by that old familiar narcotic knowledge, the pursuit of it, the unraveling of the mystery, the ferreting out of clues.  “Uh, up on the shelf, I think, right above the computer monitor just inside the door.  Bring the laptop – that’ll be simplest.  Oh, and see if Siler can dig up a network cable for you, one long enough that we can run it down the hall and hook into the Internet if the CD doesn’t have what we need.”

“Right.  Gotcha.”  And he was out the door with all the vitality of youth energized by purpose.

That left just Sam, sitting there, smiling at him.  Genuinely smiling, reflecting the minor miracle of hope.  Then again, maybe it wasn’t so minor.  It was something.  Something that had nothing to do with giving up or giving in.

“Sam, can I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure, Daniel.  Anything.”  He knew she meant it, too.

“What’s that scent – like oranges and flowers?  Is it your shampoo?  Perfume?”  He’d always wondered and felt a little odd finally asking the question.  She gave him an equally odd look in response.

“It’s perfume.  I don’t wear it very often.  Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no particular reason.  Just… wondering.”  It was one of those little mysteries of life that inexplicably tended toward obsession until the answer was revealed.  He just had to know.  He had to ask now.  Just in case.  Hope wasn’t made of steel, after all, and neither was he.

* * * * *

In the end, it was the linguistic equivalent of making goulash – a little of this, a little of that, throw in some assumptions and educated guesses, and add a dash of instinct.  The dialect didn’t match any of the terrestrial versions of Latin, just as Ancient didn’t match Medieval Latin exactly, but they were able to extrapolate from the way the language evolved on Earth to get a close approximation of how it could have evolved on another planet.  It still didn’t parse to an intelligent translation, though.  What resulted was something halfway between poetry and technical jargon – not exactly an aesthetic combination.

This was where the dash of instinct came in.  There was something there, something vaguely familiar, but it took McConnell going back to the drawing board and reading the original text aloud for Daniel to realize what was tickling at the edge of his brain.  Abydonian – some vowels, some sibilants, an overall hint of desert flavor.  The “dialect” was really a pidgin.  But what did that mean?  Had the Ancients also taken humans from Egypt?  Had they rescued slaves from the Goa’uld, taken in refugees?

He rubbed at his scalp, then started to scratch a sudden itch.  Something came loose.  He pulled his hand back down and stared at what was there – a clump of his hair, dull, brittle – dead.  Sam had been working through a particularly tricky passage with McConnell, tempering his linguistic talent with her scientific expertise.  Her voice seemed faint and distant all of a sudden, and although he could still register that there was something like excitement in what she was saying, he couldn’t quite make out the words.  There was a beat of silence, then what she said next came to him sharp and clear.  “Oh my God.  Daniel…”

He glanced up at her, then back down at the clump of hair.  He found himself saying something, although it felt like someone else was saying it.  “It’s okay.  Janet told me that might happen.  I said I didn’t want to know the details, but she insisted on giving me the _Reader’s Digest_ version.  I guess she thinks I’m vain or something.”

Her hand covered his, hiding the indisputable evidence of what was going on in every cell of his body.  “She doesn’t think you’re vain, Daniel.”  She was attempting to smile, but the expression stopped short of her eyes.  “She just wanted you to know.  Knowing is better than not knowing.”

“Maybe,” he said as she closed her hand, gathering up and taking away the evidence.  “It’s just hair.  It’ll grow back.”  _Not if you’re dead_ , said the part of his brain that had already surrendered.  The other half kicked back.  “It sounded like you were getting somewhere with the translation.  What is it?  Some good news, I hope.  I’ll even take neutral at this point.”

McConnell took the opportunity to excuse himself, muttering something about needing to double-check one of his references.  Sam stared after him for a few moments with a perplexed look on her face, then she shook her head and returned her attention to Daniel.  Her voice was a bit shaky at first, nervous perhaps, but it quickly evened out.  Sam, taking comfort in facts.  “Okay, so we’ve determined that the ‘small ones’ were actually the surviving members of the research team, probably apprentices of some sort who weren’t at the testing site when the accident occurred.  So it follows from the context that ‘dancing in the sun’ means going aboveground, outside of the research facility.”  She paused and looked at him expectantly.

He should be able to see where this was going, but he couldn’t.  And he couldn’t afford to get frustrated, either.  All that did was make him even more tired.  “I don’t get it,” he finally had to admit.  “Why is that important?”

“Okay.  The only way in or out of the cavern is via the Stargate.  That indicates a highly secure facility.  There must’ve been some hefty restrictions placed on continuing the tachyon research after the lead researcher was killed.  The apprentices probably had to leave the main facility so they could carry with on their mentors’ work, possibly without official sanction.”

“So ‘small ones’ don’t always do as they’re told, either.”  At least his sense of humor was still functioning.

She smiled, a bit less forced this time.  “Yeah, something like that.  In any event, that brings us to what I thought was just someone’s doodlings in the margins of the paper.  They’re actually rough sketches of a device the apprentices developed, a kind of bracelet that can be locked around the wrist of a test subject.  It’s meant to act as an anchor of sorts, preventing the tachyons from pulling the test subject randomly off across space and time. Sort of a first step towards controlling the effects of the tachyon generator.”

“Hmm.  Okay.  Sort of an anchor for the seas of time.”  His brain was finally shifting out of first gear, his thoughts skipping ahead.  Now he could see where she was going with this, but he left her to hash out the details while he mentally explored the overall concept.

“Yeah.  That’s a good way to describe it.  But there’s another way we might be able to use the device.  In cases of uncontrolled exposure to a large number of tachyons, like what happened to you, the anchor could conceivably be used to stabilize the subject.  Then, doses of energy from the tachyon decelerator could be administered in small increments over a period of time.  The cumulative effect should be enough to negate the tachyons without permanent damage to the subject.  Sort of like chemotherapy with cancer.”

“Kill the tachyons before you kill the patient?”  She winced at his question, but he didn’t have the energy to keep his thought processes in order and be tactful at the same time.  He shouldn’t have to be tactful.  This was his life they were talking about, and if he wanted to be blunt, he would be.

“Well, yes,” she finally admitted, somewhat reluctantly.  “It’s not a neat and tidy solution, but it’s something.”

“You’re forgetting one thing.”  Something very important.  _If it was a snake-head, it would’ve blasted you, Sam, my dear._   It had certainly blasted him.  Right into oblivion.

“What?”  She glanced down, looking for an answer on the sheet of paper.  If only it were as simple as words on a page, problem and solution, question and answer.

“It’s too late, Sam,” he said very gently.  There it was.  The truth, deceptively serene.  He found that he was able to accept it, finally, but she was still fighting against the inevitable.  It was one of the things he loved about her.  “I’ve already received a lethal dose.”

And now she’d been blasted, too, and looked it, every bit.  But still she questioned, looked for another piece of the puzzle, another perspective from which to look at the facts.  “You’re assuming it’s lethal.”

To her, it was an assumption.  For him, it was a fact.  “It killed the inventor and his team.”

She looked like she might actually be on the verge of admitting there were no more pieces to be found, but then she found a stray one, one with “biology” stamped on it.  “Yes, it did kill them.  And yes, these notes seem to indicate that a single dosage of radiation at a high enough level to negate the tachyons would be fatal – _for the inventor’s people_.  Their reactions to radiation exposure might be completely different.  We have no way of even knowing whether or not they were human.”

“What about the Abydonian elements of the pidgin, Sam?  The Abydonians are all human.”

“But you said it was a blending of Abydonian and Ancient.  The inventor and the others who were killed might not have been human.”

“You’re grasping at straws, Sam, and you know it.”  It was the verbal equivalent of a slap in the face.  She even looked like he had actually physically slapped her, but he couldn’t bring himself to regret it or apologize.  How odd that he had spent so much effort trying to ignore where the facts were pointing, and now he was having to force her to take a step back and let the details blend into a whole picture.  “Any living thing is made up of cells.  Radiation kills cells or mutates them.  You know that.  Enough radiation, and it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a human or an Asgard or even a Goa’uld.”

She nodded, looked away.  That look was even worse than the sympathetic, hopeless look reserved for the dying.  It was the look of Sam Carter, defeated.  And he simply could not allow that to happen.  He didn’t want her to have to live with that.  “There may be another way,” he said very softly.  She turned back, the rough edges of failure fractionally smoothed by a handful of words.  Another way.  There was always another way.  Wasn’t there?  “Now that we’ve figured out what happened, maybe we can stop it from happening again.  It may be the past for me personally, but it’s still the future for this timeline.”

The rest of the rough edges turned brittle and broke off.  A few more words to rekindle the spark.  Such a small price to pay.  “Of course!”  Sam’s eyes lit up.  “You looked at the clock and Janet’s calendar.  You know exactly when you’re going to turn back up.  I mean, when you already turned back up.  In your past, I mean.  You know what I mean.  We go back to 549, find the tachyon decelerator and the anchor – we know there’s a decelerator there, you already saw it.  There’s got to be an anchor there as well, and if there’s not, we can build one, damn it. It doesn’t look anywhere near as complicated or sophisticated as the decelerator.  Then we wait until you reappear.”  Her face fell.  “Except that–”

He knew instantly what thought had just crossed her mind.  It had already crossed his.  “Except that would be using knowledge of the future to alter the future, and we have no idea what the consequences might be.  Butterflies in Hong Kong.”

For an instant, he couldn’t tell whether she was going to cry or scream.  She looked like she could do either one, but she went another direction entirely.  Somewhere in the middle, there was a fierceness that spread across her face, bringing to his mind images of Shiva, the goddess of destruction dancing between the Creator and the Preserver.  “No.  Screw the butterflies.  I will not stand by and watch this happen, not if it’s the last thing I do, both as your friend and as an officer.”

The implications of one last gesture for a friend were too stinging, so he focussed instead on the “officer” half of her statement.  “Sam, I can’t let you jeopardize your career for me.”

She was silent for a moment, but instead of the protest he was expecting, she asked a question.  “Did I ever tell you why I joined the military?”

“Well, no,” he replied, somewhat taken aback by the change of subject.  “I assumed it had something to do with your father, carrying on family traditions, that sort of thing.”

“Nope.  That wasn’t it at all.  In fact, to be perfectly honest, there have been times when I’ve been tempted to resign just to spite my father.  I joined the military to get a shot at the space program.  It was a means to an end.  And here I am.  I got what I wanted, although not in quite the way I expected when I enlisted.  But you know what?  I’ve discovered along the way there are some things much more important than goals and success and achievement, things that are much more valuable – friends, family, individual human lives.  Life is such a precious gift, Daniel.  A miracle.  Science can’t explain it, not really.  It’s worth more than the bars on my shoulder or a crate full of commendations.  You’re worth it, Daniel.”

He was quite literally struck speechless.  There was absolutely nothing he could say in response to that, nothing he could do but look at her and smile softly, gently, with all the tenderness in his heart.  She reached out and grabbed his hand and squeezed it fiercely.  He would’ve felt that touch even if it had been the numb hand.


	11. Where There's a Will...

Jack hated hospitals.  Or infirmaries, or sickbays, or clinics.  Whatever you wanted to call them.  The places where the sick and dying congregated.  Waiting.  To get better, to get worse.  To die.

And that smell.  Didn’t matter if the infirmary had been relocated.  It took its smell with it wherever it went.  The slightest whiff made him cringe.

But he had to go.  For Daniel.  Daniel might want to be alone, but then again, maybe not.  That had to be Daniel’s choice.  And he couldn’t make the choice if Jack didn’t give him the opportunity to kick him out.

He’d been to see Daniel a couple of times since the return visit to 549, but Daniel had either been sleeping, or McConnell and Sam had been there and there’d been little for him to contribute to the conversation.  Now the translating was done, the answers were found.  Sam had filled him in on the details, and together, they had gone over every possible objection they could imagine Hammond might throw on the table.  They were ready, counterpoint for every last point.

And now Daniel was alone.  All the more reason to leave him alone.  All the more reason not to.  Maybe he’d be asleep.

No such luck.  He was propped up against the pillows, his knees pulled up with a piece of paper balanced precariously on top, his arms lax on either side of his body.  He seemed to be reading whatever was on the piece of paper, his head bowed over it, a wisp of hair falling across his forehead.  His hair was noticeably thinner.  It caused an unexpected twist in his gut.  He teased Daniel enough about his long hair, but this was certainly not the way he wanted to see it go.

“Hey.”  Jack said it softly, but Daniel still jumped.  Maybe he’d been dozing after all.

The piece of paper slid off his knees and fell to the floor.  Daniel followed its descent with his eyes, but made no move to stop it.  “I liked it better as poetry.”

Must be that final translation they had been working on, the one Sam had gotten so obsessed about.  Thank goodness for plain old pig-headed determination.  Without it, they’d be backed up against the wall right now with nowhere to turn.  He retrieved the piece of paper and very carefully laid it down on the bedside table.  “How are you holding up?”

“Okay, I guess.”  He reached up and very gingerly brushed the stands of hair off his forehead.  Probably afraid they would come out if he wasn’t careful.  He was probably right.  Simple cause and effect.  The movement caused the hospital gown to shift slightly away from the opposite shoulder, revealing that the tube Jack had assumed led to somewhere or other lower down actually stopped near the collar bone.  Actually, it didn’t stop there.  It was very neatly taped down, but he could tell it went right on into Daniel’s chest.  He really didn’t mean to stare, but it was… revoltingly fascinating.

“Central line.”

“Huh?  What?”  Jack jerked his eyes back up to Daniel’s face.  He was looking very calmly at Jack.  How could he be so calm?  Jack knew what the damn thing was.  He just hadn’t expected to see one stuck into Daniel.

“To replace the IV they were using for the meds.  The veins in that arm kept blowing.  And, well…”  His voice trailed off, and he looked down to where the arm in question was resting behind his upraised knees.  “I’ll spare you having to look at it.  They’re getting ready to remove the dead tissue.”  He said it very matter-of-factly, his eyes squinting slightly like he was examining the finer details of some piece of ancient alien junk.

“Geez, Daniel…”  It was all he could think of to say.  _Real good.  Great way to reassure your friend._

“It’s okay.”  He was still looking dispassionately downwards towards his arm.

The matter-of-factness sparked a sudden rise of anger.  “It’s not okay, Daniel.  It may be a lot of things, but it’s not okay.”

“No, no, that’s not what I mean.”  He reached up and tugged the gown back over the insertion point of the central line.  “It’s just…  Well…  Hell, I don’t know what I mean.  I’m just so damn tired.  The amphetamines were helping, but Janet cut them off as soon as we’d finished the translations.”

Whoa.  Talk about your basic change of subject.  That was about the last thing he expected Daniel to say.  “Amphetamines?  You’re joking, right?”  What was he talking about?  Doc Fraiser handing out speed?

“Yeah.”  He managed a small smile.  “She insisted I stay informed about my meds, so I insisted she give me something to keep me alert enough to help with the translations.  She didn’t like it.  Not one bit.  But she did it.  I guess she’s not too worried about me becoming a junkie at this point.”

“No.  I guess not.”  There was entirely too much truth lurking behind that comment.  Jack switched tactics.  “So.”  He pulled up a chair and sat down, leaning forwards with his elbows on his knees.  “Hammond’s tied up in a conference call with the President and the Joint Chiefs.  They’re not real pleased about all that government property disappearing.  Those toilet seats ain’t cheap, you know.”

The result was what Jack was hoping for.  Daniel laughed – a genuine, if somewhat raspy laugh.  He ended up coughing.  And then retching in soundless heaves.  He didn’t seem to be able to stop, and grabbed the edge of the sheet to cover his mouth.

That didn’t keep Jack from seeing the blood.  The vivid red was like a kick in the gut, leaving him breathless.  It took him a couple of tries and a few hard swallows, but he finally managed to stand up and say, “I’m getting Doctor Fraiser.”

Daniel shook his head, pressing the sheet more firmly to his mouth.  “No,” he managed to gasp between deep, hitching breaths.  “There’s… nothing… she can do.”

“Daniel, I–”  He stopped.  He didn’t know what to say, what he could possibly say.  Daniel made another hacking noise that almost sounded like a word.  “What was that?  Did you say something, Daniel?”

“I said… go.  Please, Jack.  Just go.”

And that was the closest Daniel would ever get to kicking him out.  He got up and left.

* * * * *

There was a moment of silence after Sam finished outlining the plan.  Jack kept his eyes locked on Hammond, waiting for objection number one.  Hammond didn’t disappoint him.  He went straight for a whopper, right off the bat.  “Explain to me how this situation is any different from when SG-1 was thrown back to 1969.  As I recall, Captain Carter, you felt it was essential not to use your knowledge to influence the outcome of future events.”

Sam just stared at him for a moment.  When Jack had discussed with her all the possible sticking points prior to the briefing, she’d said she felt this particular one would be pretty far down on the list.  She’d thought the General would be more concerned about the potential dangers of bringing alien technology back to the base, just as he had been when they’d gone and gathered the notes.  Jack knew this was an entirely different ball of wax, though.

Sam quickly rallied her wits.  “With all due respect, Sir, this really isn’t the same at all.  None of us are actually from the future, not even Daniel, even if he was there for a short time.  We don’t have extensive knowledge of what’s going to happen like we did when we were in 1969.  We only know one thing, really – the time and date when Daniel is going to reappear – tomorrow morning just before 0800.”

Score one for Sam.  Jack leaned forwards and added the slam dunk.  “You have to admit it’s similar to the way we used the timing of the solar flares to get back home.  Information, I should point out, that you gave us.  Sir.”

Hammond smiled ever so slightly, like he’d expected Jack to make that point.  Touche.  Really, they knew each other entirely too well.  Hammond now shifted to a slightly more philosophical tack, just as Jack suspected he might.  “Fair enough.  But is it even possible to change what’s already happened?  Do we even have the right to decide how it’s meant to be?”

When Jack had brought that up during their strategy session, Sam had just about exploded.  She’d even called him by his first name, like it was an insult.  He was glad she’d gotten riled up, though.  She was much more composed now, and it showed in her answer.  “Determinism is not something I’ve ever given much credence to, Sir, but that’s neither here nor there.  Daniel doesn’t deserve to die like that.  Not when there’s something we can do about it.  We can’t just let it happen.”

Hammond didn’t respond immediately.  Instead, he looked slowly around the table, fixing Jack, Sam, Teal’c and Fraiser each with an individually probing stare.  Jack didn’t flinch in the slightest, and if any of the others did, they didn’t show it.  He did, however, feel like he was on the verge of losing what he had left of his patience.  He wanted to get this over with already.  They’d been waiting long enough.  He decided to throw the rest of the cards on the table so they could get the show on the road.

“Sir, we understand the security of this facility and the safety of its personnel are priorities, but based on what Daniel told us about tomorrow, we’re looking at minimal risk.  The tachyons haven’t spread in over 48 hours.  It looks like we’re not going to have a problem finding the tachyon decelerator and setting it off.  We wouldn’t be having this discussion otherwise.  All we have to do is wait just a few minutes longer so we can get him clear of the area.  We can’t leave him behind if we know can save him.”

Just a few more beats of silence, then Hammond nodded and folded his hands in front of him on the table.  Oh, yes.  Decision time.  Finally.  “All right.  SG-1, you have a go to return to P4J549.  Only the relevant artifacts will be retrieved and strict quarantine and containment procedures will be observed.  Assemble the necessary equipment and report to the ‘Gate Room at–”  He paused and looked at his watch.  Jack suppressed a surge of irritation.  _Yeah, George, it’s late.  Real late, and we’re all very tired, so let’s get a move-on._   “23:30 sharp.  Dismissed.”

Hammond turned toward his office, and Sam and Teal’c filed out of the conference room, but Jack caught Janet’s elbow as she walked past him.  She’d already given her report on Daniel’s current condition at the start of the briefing.  She’d been consulting with experts in the field of radiation treatment, phrasing everything very carefully in terms of the hypothetical so as to not compromise the security of the project, but even so, the responses weren’t exactly encouraging.

The rundown of symptoms Daniel was experiencing had been even less promising.  Considerable pain and nausea.  Mucus membranes in the intestinal tract breaking down, leading to abdominal cramping and continued vomiting, now mixed with blood.  Yeah, he could’ve told her that.

Overall blood volume, cell counts and platelet levels dropping.  Hair falling out.  And if that weren’t insult enough, there were the decaying tissues in Daniel’s forearm and indications that the condition was spreading up towards his shoulder.  Necrosis.  What a disgusting word.  All too appropriate.

Right now, he wanted some answers of the sort that didn’t go into a medical report and didn’t really belong in an official briefing, either.  “Do you have a minute, Doctor?”

She frowned as if she were a bit annoyed at being kept from returning to her patient, but she apparently decided it was best to let him ask his questions now and get them out of the way.  Smart woman.  “Yes, Colonel, I can spare a few minutes.  Then I need to get back to the infirmary.”

“I know.  I just wanted to ask you what you’ve told Daniel.”

“I haven’t hidden anything from him.  He’s well aware of the diagnosis and the progression of the symptoms.  He didn’t want to hear about it, but I told him.  It’s better that way.”

“I agree.  But even if everything goes right, we could still be wrong. Nothing would change. Does he know he might not make it out of this alive?”  How was it that saying the words could make it so much more real?  They were just words, damn it.  But words were what framed the truth.

She was going to deny it.  He could see her rallying all the maybe’s and not-sure’s and what-if’s as she drew in a deep breath.  She held it for a moment, then let it back out.  “He knows, Colonel.  They always know when they go like that, when there’s time to see it coming.  They may try to deny it, but they know.”

He wasn’t sure how to respond.  He’d fully expected to have to force the truth out of her, but she’d laid it right down in front of him.  Complete capitulation.  He hadn’t been counting on agreement, but he understood what she was saying.  What she’d seen in hospital wards, he’d seen on the battlefield.  Time enough to see it coming could be as little as a few minutes.  Daniel had already had days.  “And there’s absolutely nothing you can do?”  It was a ridiculous thing to ask.  Desperate.  But here he was, asking it.  Because it was Daniel.

She sighed and shoved her hands into the pockets of her lab coat.  “I can make him as comfortable as possible for as long as possible.  We’re replacing fluids and blood as fast as we can, keeping a careful eye on his medications.  I switched him from morphine to high potency Dilaudid just before the meeting, but I can’t just pump drugs into him indiscriminately.  His system’s damaged enough as it is, so we have to be careful not to introduce a potentially lethal combination.”

Potentially lethal…  The words repeated themselves in his mind.  There was a fine line between cruelty and kindness.  He’d balanced on the razor sharp edge where death would’ve been mercy, if only his captors had the slightest hint of mercy in their constitution.  The cruelest kind of mercy possible.  The mercy of giving up.  No, not just of giving up, but of actively pursuing the end.

He realized he was staring at Janet.  She was staring back, doing that female trick of mind-reading that generally annoyed the hell out of him.  “Oh, no.  Don’t you dare even think of asking me that.”

He didn’t so much as twitch, his eyes locked on hers in what could easily have become a battle of wills.  There couldn’t be any victory, though, nothing but a sick feeling of having given up too soon and enough damning self-recrimination to last a lifetime.  He shook his head.  “No.  I’d never ask someone else to do something I wouldn’t be willing to do myself.”

She sighed, the tension in her body minutely relaxing.  “I know.  I couldn’t do it, either.  Even if there weren’t such a thing as the Hippocratic Oath.”

“You gave him amphetamines, though.”  He grabbed the opportunity to change the subject without even realizing what he was doing until after he’d made the half-hearted accusation.

She gave him a sharp, appraising look.  “Oh, he told you that, did he?  I’ll have you know that under certain, very limited circumstances, that’s a perfectly legitimate and viable solution for extreme drowsiness.  He’s still completely in control of his mental faculties, so within the limits of the law and medical ethics, he still gets final say on his own medical care.  Period.  End of discussion.”

He briefly entertained the idea of arguing with her, anything to vent some of the directionless anger he’d been trying to deal with since Daniel had asked him to leave the infirmary.  He couldn’t yell at Daniel, and there was no point in yelling at Janet, so instead he simply said, “You’re a very stubborn person, Doctor.  That’s at least one thing we have in common.”

She eyed him warily, maybe trying to decide whether she should take his words as a compliment or an insult.  “Yeah, I noticed that.  I don’t like to lose a patient, and you don’t like to lose a team member.”

Team member…  “Oh, he’s much more than that, Janet.”

She looked at him for a few more seconds, then finally looked down at the floor.  So much truth.  Too much truth.  “I know.  I don’t like to lose friends, either,” she said quietly as she gave him the faintest flicker of a hollow smile and reached out to briefly touch his arm before she turned and left.


	12. Distractions

The two hours of restless something-like-sleep Sam had managed to squeeze in while they were waiting for General Hammond to get off his conference call didn’t seem to have done her much good.  It was nowhere near enough to recover from the stress of the past few days, and now, she was starting to hear things.  Not just stray sounds, either.  Music.  Strings.  A full-fledged orchestra.  Mozart?

As she walked into the infirmary, she nodded to Nurse Clark, stationed at a folding table that had been drafted into service as a duty desk.  There were no patients currently in residence apart from Daniel, who was still in the adjacent room, but it looked like Clark had been left with the unenviable task of organizing the paperwork from the earlier slew of injuries.  It was a good thing there weren’t any more new patients – one more file and that stack was going to spill over into a paperwork avalanche.

“Need a shovel?” she asked, smiling at Clark’s frazzled expression.  Stopping for chit-chat.  It was a delaying tactic.  She almost didn’t want to go into the room next door.  She had to, though.  She needed to.

“Actually, I think a can of gasoline and a match would be preferable.  Doctor Fraiser’s down the hall on the phone with a doctor in Russia who treated some of the Chernobyl victims, but you can go in and see Doctor Jackson if you’d like.”

“Okay, thanks.”  That was so like Janet – stubborn to the core, never giving up, not until the very last breath, the very last heartbeat, the very last impulse from a dying brain.  Her persistence was reassuring.  Sometimes, you forecast and planned and prepared, so carefully that you’d swear up and down you’d covered every possibility.  And then the impossible would slip through the net.  Sometimes it was a good impossible, sometimes not, but that didn’t mean you gave up until every last possible impossibility was covered.

Sam frowned and stopped only a few steps past the duty desk.  The music was still there, a faint outpouring of strings and flutes and subdued trumpets.  She turned back to Clark.  “Am I going nuts, or do you hear music too?”

Clark frowned at her for a second, apparently confused by the abrupt change of subject, then said, “Oh.  Yes.  Don’t worry, you’re not hearing things.  Teal’c brought a CD player and some CDs in to Doctor Jackson a little while ago.  It’s quite nice, isn’t it?  Soothing.”

“Yes.  Yes, it is.”  How odd.  She had no idea Teal’c had taken an interest in Earth music.  And for him to think of bringing it to Daniel at a time when he needed distraction more than just about anything else…  It really shouldn’t surprise her.  Teal’c was a very thoughtful and considerate person, but she was still amazed at times at the forms that consideration took.

The overhead lights in Daniel’s room had been turned off, their illumination replaced by the soft and restful glow of a lamp on the bedside table.  The CD player stood alongside the lamp, the susurration of music almost loud enough to overpower the humming and beeping of the monitors on the other side of the bed – almost, but not quite.  The sheet and a blanket in the ubiquitous olive drab were tucked securely across Daniel’s chest, both arms resting on top.  The transfusion IV was still hooked to his good arm, and the other was now swathed in bandages.  They’d removed the decaying tissue and packed the resultant wounds.  Janet had said they could worry about skin grafts later.  As if there would be a later.  If there was a later for Daniel, none of this would’ve happened in the first place.  They would’ve stopped it before it started.

His eyes were closed, and he seemed to be sleeping, but his was far from peaceful.  The top of the bed had been elevated to ease his breathing, and an oxygen cannula had been added to the various tubes and wires running in and out of him, but it still seemed to be taking more than the usual amount of effort for him to keep the air flowing in and out of lungs that were starting to fill with fluid.  There was a little more hair gone, but apart from that and the bandages on his arm, he really looked no worse than the last time she had seen him.  That wasn’t saying much, really.

There was a constant ebb and flow of pain underneath skin that had paled almost to the point of translucence.  There was a hint of yellow there, too.  Janet had said his liver was starting to fail, as well as his kidneys, but it hadn’t reached the critical point yet.  More than likely, he would be dead before that happened.  Janet hadn’t stated that specifically, but it was easy enough to read between the lines.

Sam had managed to keep from crying up until this point, even when she was alone, but she didn’t feel like there was enough strength left in her to resist for much longer.  It was inevitable.  It was human.  Human pain, human grief – but an inhuman death.  No one should have to die like this.  It was the worst kind of death possible.  No peaceful slipping into oblivion; no quick mercy; no last, desperate rush to do some final, fleeting bit of good.  Better to have your head blown off on a battlefield.

She didn’t want to wake him.  She didn’t want to see him suffer any more.  She didn’t want him to see her cry.  She was turning to go when he said her name very softly.  _Oh, God._   She managed to pull herself together – by some small miracle, by some titanic exertion of will.  His eyes were still closed.  “How did you know it was me?”

He opened his eyes and looked at her, and wonder of all wonders, there was something like peace there, a thin gauze of tranquillity overlaying the pain.  “Oranges and flowers,” he said simply.

She paused a moment, her stunned brain not making sense of the words at first.  Then she pulled her wits back around her, an elusive and fragile armor against the truth.  “We’re going back to 549.  General Hammond approved the plan.”

“So how hard did you have to twist his arm to–”  He broke off as a spasm rippled up through his chest, causing his head to pull up off the pillow.  She thought he was coughing or maybe hiccuping, but then she realized he was trying to fight back another bout of nausea.  His hand scrabbled blindly toward the bedside table.  As soon as she realized that he was reaching for a small basin tucked behind the CD player, she leaned over and grabbed it for him, then held it under his chin as he spit the blood out of his mouth.  She felt hot and dizzy and her vision went out of focus for a second.

He was trying to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, but his hand was trembling.  All he was managing to do was smear the drops of blood across his lips and onto his chin.  There was a box of Kleenex on the bedside table.  _Semper paratus._   She pulled a few sheets from the box and gently wiped his chin, then stuffed the red-smeared wad of tissue into the basin, trying to hide the blood.  Hide it from him or from herself?  What a pointless thing to do.

“Thanks,” he muttered, a bit self-consciously.  Leave it to Daniel to remember to thank someone for wiping up the blood after he’d hacked up part of his guts.

“I have to go now.”  It wasn’t just because she needed to retrieve her gear and get to the ‘Gate Room.  She was still absurdly hoping to keep him from seeing her cry.  “We’re only going to get one chance at this.  Wouldn’t want to miss your reappearance.”

“You already missed it once.”

She thought about that a moment, part of her mind figuring out that he meant what had happened in his past, tomorrow, on Friday, before he’d been thrown back to the day before yesterday.  The other part of her mind was breathing a sigh of relief at being provided with a brief distraction from thoughts of blood and bodies and of hearts ripped apart.  “I guess we did.”

“So if you miss me again, won’t I just be thrown into the past – again?”  He seemed to have recovered his composure – at least, what he had left of it.  His brain was obviously still in good condition, despite the treacherous slope his body was sliding down.

“I–  I don’t know.”  She felt the lump wedge itself back into her throat for the first time in several hours.  Or maybe she had just gotten used to it and was suddenly aware of it again.  “We’re altering what you experienced as the future by waiting to trigger the tachyon decelerator.  The decelerator may very well be what caused you to be thrown back into the past in the first place.  Changing the sequence of events may change the outcome.”

“Butterflies in Hong Kong.”

She nodded.  What was it she had said to him earlier?  Screw the butterflies.

* * * * *

As a warrior, Teal’c had been trained to action and conditioned to follow orders without question and without hesitation.  He had lived with the enemy, quite literally slept with the enemy, carried it inside of him.  He had maimed, murdered and tortured in the name of the enemy.  He had seen comrades fall in battle, lost friends in brutal servitude to a false god, had risked his family and almost lost them too.  He had given up the life he had been raised to, renounced the beliefs he had held to, turned his back on the service he had been sworn to.

In spite of all of that, or maybe because of it, he had never felt quite so at odds with himself as he did now.  His friend was dying, and there was so little he could do.

He had helped to clear the lower levels of the complex so the Stargate could remain open for returning teams, knowing that Daniel Jackson would blame himself if anyone was lost.  He had tried to offer solidarity and the comfort of presence with brief visits, but he had been disquieted by the possibility that he might be interrupting the translation work that might hold the key to his friend’s salvation.  Now they had found the key, and perhaps Teal’c would be able to help them locate the lock in which to turn it.  They were returning to P4J549, and now they knew what to seek.

He drew in a deep breath and shifted his grip on his staff weapon, muscles tensed to ascend the ramp as soon as the wormhole was established.  Two more chevrons remained.  One more.  But the seventh chevron did not lock.  The Stargate stopped halfway through its spin toward the final symbol.  The light of the chevrons went out.

O’Neill’s voice, oddly calm and controlled, disturbed the dumbfounded hush that ensued.  “How did I know that was gonna happen?”

Teal’c turned his head toward O’Neill.  Was this another of O’Neill’s rhetorical questions, or was he questioning whether he had precognitive ability?  O’Neill had disparaged the latter concept in the past, so the question must be rhetorical, not meant to be answered.  Teal’c, therefore, remained silent, but Captain Carter apparently did not realize that she was not meant to address the question.  “Because you’re a pessimist, Sir?”  O’Neill glared at her.  Ah, a joke.  The trading of insults in a friendly manner.

O’Neill turned and demanded an explanation for the abrupt disengagement of the dialing sequence.  After a few moments of intense consultation within the control room, the report came back that some of the patch cables running from the generator to the upper levels of the complex had yet again been afflicted by the tachyons.  They would have to wait for repairs to be made.

Captain Carter seemed to be quite agitated by this pronouncement.  She turned to O’Neill.  “Sir, we can’t afford to take a chance with the timing.  I think we should consider activating the second ‘Gate at this point.”

O’Neill appeared to briefly consider the suggestion, but then shook his head.  “It would take more time than we have to get it out of storage and get it set up.  That iris we welded onto it wasn’t designed to pop right off.  No, our best bet is to repair the ‘Gate here.”

She looked liked she wanted to protest, but she pressed her lips together and nodded sharply.  “Then with your permission, Sir, I’d like to assist with the repairs.”

O’Neill paused, then nodded his agreement.  She turned and left without another word.  That left just Teal’c himself and O’Neill in the ‘Gate Room.  O’Neill was standing still, his attention now turned toward the recalcitrant Stargate.  He was silent and motionless for a full minute before Teal’c felt sure that this meant his commander was troubled.

The humans had a saying that “laughter is the best medicine.”  O’Neill himself often used humor to defuse a tense situation.  Perhaps this was the approach to use.  He asked O’Neill, “While we are waiting, would it be possible for me to see your card?”

O’Neill turned and looked at him.  “What in the world are you talking about, Teal’c?”  His tone conveyed annoyance at the distraction.  Perhaps he did not realize that the comment was meant facetiously.  More explanation must be required.

“I am speaking of your pessimist card.  Captain Carter has said to me that you are a ‘card-carrying pessimist.’  I would be very interested to see what such a card looks like.”

O’Neill continued to stare at him.  Teal’c was beginning to wonder if he had confused the meaning of the words yet again and had inadvertently insulted the Colonel.  He was considering whether an apology should be offered when O’Neill twisted his head side to side one time, his mouth quirked upwards in an expression that seemed more grimace than smile.  “Sorry, Teal’c – must’ve left it in my other flak jacket.”  Ah.  Sarcasm.  The expected O’Neill response.  “Looks like we’re standing down until Scotty Siler gets the problem fixed.”

Teal’c frowned.  “Sergeant Siler’s first name is not Scotty.”

“It’s a joke, Teal’c.  Look, never mind.  I’m going to go see if I can light a fire under the Sergeant’s butt.  Maybe you could go let Daniel know what’s keeping us so long?”

“Yes, of course.  But I fail to see how igniting a fire under Sergeant Siler’s posterior will serve to expedite his efforts.”

O’Neill threw his hands up in that peculiar human gesture of frustration.  “Do you always have to be so literal?  It’s a joke, for crying out loud.”

“I am aware of that, O’Neill,” he replied calmly.

O’Neill motioned with one hand, his index and middle finger raised and taut, pointing towards Teal’c’s face, but Teal’c could see there was no tension behind the gesture, no coiling of muscles.  O’Neill would not actually touch him, much less attempt to stab his eyes out.  The first time O’Neill had done this in his presence had almost been disastrous for O’Neill, and Teal’c had been made to watch three men called Stooges as penance.  Teal’c knew better now.  He even knew the appropriate defense of raising his flattened hand in front of his face, perpendicular to his nose.  He did so now, and was rewarded by a faint smile and a fraction of a chuckle from O’Neill.

O’Neill aborted the false attack and completed the gesture by grinding his fist into his opposite palm.  Then he reached out and squeezed Teal’c’s arm firmly, shaking it a bit as he half-smiled, half-glared and said, “Just… go and fill Daniel in, will ya?  And… thank you.”

Teal’c inclined his head, gratified he had helped to lighten O’Neill’s mood, if only in the slightest degree and only for a few moments.  As he left the ‘Gate Room, he realized there was something else he could do.  Something for Daniel Jackson.  Now that they seemed to be faced with a protracted wait before they could return to P4J549, there was time for a gesture of friendship he had not thought to offer before.  It could be that he would not have the opportunity to offer it again.


	13. Konara

Daniel just wanted to sleep, but he couldn’t.  It wasn’t like earlier, when he was afraid he’d open his eyes and find himself in some other place or time.  Now he was afraid he wouldn’t open his eyes again at all.

He let himself drift, soft music from the CD player lulling him.  Clark would come in every now and then and check the monitors and IV solutions, change the bandages on his arm, clean up whatever new mess of blood or vomit he’d managed to make, smooth or change the sheets and his hospital gown.  She had gentle hands and gentle eyes that somehow managed not to look at him with pity.  She didn’t say much, but that was all right.  She was a comforting presence nonetheless.   When one CD finished playing, she would change it to another.  She’d asked him the first time what he wanted to listen to next, but he’d told her to pick something.  She didn’t ask again, for which he was grateful.

When Teal’c appeared in the doorway, Daniel had the vague sense his presence here was odd, but it took him a moment to realize what was bothering him.  Teal’c was supposed to be on 549 right now.  Then again, his sense of time seemed to be just about completely shot right now.  It was getting difficult to tell how long was actually passing between each new wave of pain, each bout of nausea.  Maybe they’d already gone to 549 and come back again.

He supposed he should say something.  “Hi.”  There.  Nice, direct, to the point, requiring little effort.  Teal’c nodded in reply.  Maybe he’d try that next time.  Then again, moving his head would probably be more uncomfortable than moving his mouth.  “Find anything on 549?”

“We have not yet been back to the planet.  The Stargate has malfunctioned.  It is being repaired.”

“Oh.”  He let his eyes slide closed.  He should be worried about that, shouldn’t he?  His sense of caring was just about as worn and useless as his sense of time.  Caring took energy, and fear and fighting it off were taking just about all he had.

“Do not be concerned, Daniel Jackson.  We will soon be on our way.  We will find what we need.”

He sounded like he really believed what he was saying.  Maybe Daniel could find it in himself to believe too, just for a little while longer.

It was quiet for a moment, and Daniel thought maybe Teal’c had gone.  He was relieved and felt a horrible sense of loss at the same time, but as he slitted one eye open, he found Teal’c still standing there.  He was holding some kind of box in his hands.  Dark, maybe wood.  Hard to tell without his glasses.  “I’m sorry, Teal’c.  I don’t feel much like talking right now.”

“I understand.  I have not come to talk.  I have come to ask if you would do me a… favor.”

“Sure.”  He answered automatically, then realized there was very little he _could_ do.  Oh well.  It didn’t really matter.

“I have come to ask if you would do me the honor,” this word came with more assurance than “favor,” “of allowing me to perform the _konara_ ceremony.”

_Konara_?  The word sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place it.  Curiosity stirred, but only as a faint reflection of its former self.  “What’s that?  Some kind of Jaffa Last Rites?”

“If you are referring to what your Catholics call ‘Last Rites,’ then no, it is not.  It is, however, a last rite of sorts – the final ceremony performed before a Jaffa goes into battle.  It is meant to purify and focus the thoughts and prepare for the trials to come.”

“Oh.  Okay.”  Sounded pretty much like Catholic Last Rites to him, but arguing semantics was the last thing he wanted to do right now.  No.  Actually, dying was the last.  What a piss-poor joke.  Of course it was the last.

“Then you will allow me to perform the ceremony?”

He shut his eyes, half from lack of caring, half because he was so incredibly tired.  Weary.  Exhausted.  Bone deep.  “Sure.  Why not?”

There was a pause.  “It involves the shaving of the head.”

Daniel opened his eyes again and tried to bring Teal’c into some semblance of focus.  He could tell by the tone of his voice that this was very important to him.  And he suddenly realized that it was important to himself as well.  Important because Teal’c was a friend.  Dying didn’t stop that.  Maybe death did, but he wasn’t there yet.  “That’s not a problem, Teal’c.  It’s falling out anyway.  Just tell me what you need me to do.”

Teal’c set the box down and helped Daniel to sit up a little further.  The movement brought a new round of pain and nausea, but he bit his lower lip and forced himself through it.  The pain had been so all-consuming he had lost all perspective.  Really, the pain didn’t matter.  Not in the end.

“That is all I require of you, Daniel Jackson.  I will do the rest.”

Teal’c opened the box and took something out.  Daniel couldn’t tell what.  Curiosity flashed, and he fumbled for his glasses on the bedside table.  Teal’c paused and handed them to him, and he slowly slipped them onto his face with unsteady hands.  He wanted to be able to see every detail he possibly could.  It might be the last time he would ever witness something like this.

A candle.  It was a candle.  A creamy taper in a simple iron holder.  Teal’c set it carefully on the table, then added another to form a matched pair.  Perfect simplicity, perfect balance.  He touched a match to the wicks and a soft glow burned into life.  Perfect purity, flickering yet constant.  Between the candles he placed a small copper brazier and filled it with incense.  As he picked up one of the candles and lit the incense, the piece that had been playing on the CD player came to an end.

Music had been such a constant companion for Daniel over the last few hours he barely noticed it now except for when the silences came.  Then it was like he’d lost something.  The next piece began, something soothing on the piano, a ruffled tranquillity.  He had no idea who the composer was.  He’d never learned much about classical music, and now he was feeling that lack.  “You can turn the music off if you want to.”

Teal’c didn’t pause in his preparations as he said, “That is not necessary.  It is traditional for the _konara_ to be accompanied by music of a contemplative nature.  I do not think that even Master Bra’tac would object to Brahms.”

Daniel smiled softly.  “No, I don’t suppose he would.”  Then the scent of the incense reached him.  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, feeling an odd kind of lightness and clarity fill his mind.  Teal’c went on pulling items out of the box – a long, slim knife, plain but polished and sleek; the dull gray rectangle of a whetstone; a soft, round bundle of ivory-colored fabric strips; an earthen bowl and a plain clay flask.  Each item made a distinct impression on Daniel’s brain, then flitted away.  He was existing completely in the present, nothing before or after.  Just the now.

Impressions blossomed, then faded:  the hiss of the blade against the whetstone, mingled with a swirl of arpeggios; the golden glow of oil pouring from the flask into the bowl; the amazingly gentle touch of strong hands against his head and the soothing warmth and purity of the anointing; the whisper of the knife against his skin, barely making contact, sweeping away dull brittleness; the softness of finely woven linen being deftly wrapped about his head, each turn of fabric accompanied by a single word in Teal’c’s deep, rich voice.  Honor.  Virtue.  Strength.  Loyalty.  Spirit.  Fire.  Faith.  Kinship.  Devotion.  Light.  Truth.  Hope.  Peace.

And peace did come, and rest.  Teal’c tucked in the end of the final piece of linen, then helped Daniel ease himself back onto the pillows.  He blew out the candles, and Daniel closed his eyes, for this one moment in time not afraid of anything at all.

* * * * *

Sam knew Siler didn’t really need a theoretical astrophysicist to get the ‘Gate generators back online, but another warm body was welcomed since heavy restrictions had been placed on access to the levels of the complex affected by tachyons.  Anyone who didn’t absolutely need to be there at any given moment was absolutely not supposed to be there.  Siler had been more than happy to turn Sam into a cable monkey and assign her the straightforward but very necessary task of dragging power couplings down hallways and up access shafts to patch into the backup generators.

She’d been at her one-man game of tug-o-war with stubborn lengths of cable for a good 45 minutes when she ran into Jack lugging a coil of cable over his shoulder and struggling to lay it down along the hallway.  He just shrugged and said, “Siler pulled rank on me.”

She picked up the part of the cable that had just left his shoulder and made sure it ran straight and true without kinks while he concentrated on playing out additional length.  “Since when does a sergeant outrank a colonel?”

“He’s under the General’s orders to evict any personnel who aren’t required to be here.  He seems to think lighting fires under butts isn’t required for repairing the generator.  I happen to have a different opinion, but hey, I’m just a colonel.  What do I know?”

At that point, a pair of soldiers wearing the appropriate toolbelts, loaded with the right kind of equipment to make themselves essential, showed up and relieved them from cable-stringing duty.  Jack headed back down the corridor with a comment about checking to see if there were any other non-incendiary jobs that needed to be tackled, while Sam went to make sure the computer systems necessary to run the ‘Gate were being jury-rigged properly.  Simmons had that task well in hand already, so she finally had to admit she was nonessential and accordingly removed herself from the Bermuda Triangle.

There was no more avoiding it now.  She made her way back to the infirmary to see Daniel, to make sure he knew what was going on.  She got a lightheaded buzzing in her ears and felt her skin heating up just remembering what he’d looked like last time.  Her mind ran away down all kinds of grim and harrowing paths imagining what might have happened in the past hour and a half.  “Going downhill” was a disturbingly apt description.  When gravity got into the picture, acceleration was sure to follow.  They were relying on friction at this point to slow the forward momentum, but with friction came side effects like heat, and heat inevitably burned.

Clark had made a dent in the pile of paperwork, but there was still a mountain left to be conquered.  “I don’t suppose you brought any matches back with you?” she asked as Sam walked by.

She didn’t feel much like chit-chat this time, even as a delaying tactic, but she did pause long enough to say, “No, sorry, but you might want to ask Colonel O’Neill.  He seems to be into lighting fires today.”

Janet was there, checking the bandages on Daniel’s arm.  The sores on his scalp must’ve gotten worse – it looked like she’d bandaged his head, too.  As Sam got closer to the bed, though, she saw it wasn’t gauze as she had assumed, but some kind of fabric.

“Hey,” Daniel said softly, turning sunken and dark-circled eyes toward her.  “Teal’c told me about the snafu.”  Either the light was playing tricks on her, or the yellowish tone of his skin was more pronounced.  “Do you like my new look?”  He tilted his head very slightly, obviously indicating the wrappings.

“Well, I never really thought of you as a turban kind of guy, but it actually looks pretty good on you.”  She hesitated to say more, not wanting to dig below the surface of the statement to the reason why his head was wrapped up like that.

“Teal’c shaved my head.”

She thought her ears must be playing tricks on her.  “He what?”

“He shaved my head.  It’s part of a _konara_ ceremony, a rite of preparation for Jaffa warriors before they go into battle.  Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t be too thrilled about having my head shaved, no matter what the honor, but that’s not really a sticking point any more, is it?  It’s all going to fall out anyway.  Why prolong the agony…”  His voice trailed off and he averted his eyes.  Sam tried very hard not to wince at the unfortunate choice of words.  “He was amazingly gentle.  Kind of surprised me.”

And here lies another amazingly gentle man.  Amazing and surprising in so many ways.

Janet patted Daniel on the shoulder, tossed a frayed and unraveling smile at Sam, and left without another word.  She was carrying a basin stuffed full of bits of tissue and gauze streaked crimson.  There was a clean, empty basin sitting on the bedside table.  He was looking at her, noticing where she was looking.  “Sam, what’s going to happen to me?”

The question caught her off guard, took her breath away and forced tears into her eyes.  No.  She would not cry.  Not now.  Not like this.  Later.  A fragment of a half-forgotten song came to her.  _Cry a river, flood the sea, cry a river over me._   She knew she would.  “I–  You should really ask Janet that question.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.  I want to know what’s going to happen to me when the other me – the past me – reappears, when you put the anchoring device on him.”

She just about wilted with relief.  She was the right kind of doctor to answer this question, and it was a subject that didn’t have to look death in the face in search of a reply.  “It’s like Schroedinger’s cat.  Up until the point when we put the anchoring device on him – you – there’s two different possibilities.  You either get thrown into the past or you don’t.  After the choice is made, the timelines collapse into one.  Essentially, none of this will have ever happened.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”

She sent up a silent prayer she wasn’t lying to him.


	14. Last Requests

Jack had done some very difficult things in his life.  Walking into the infirmary at this moment was just one more.

He’d rounded up Teal’c, and they were going to tell Sam the ‘Gate was close to being repaired, that they could return to 549 very soon.  Nothing more than that.  But Daniel was awake and talking to Sam, so a simple errand suddenly became much more complicated.

It was getting increasingly difficult to face what was happening to his friend.  It was impossible to accept it.  He didn’t know whatever had possessed him to actually think about asking Janet to end it.  And it didn’t matter what Janet had said about the dying knowing when their time is up.  He wanted Daniel to deny it.  He couldn’t stand to see Daniel giving up.  Daniel never gave up.

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”

Jack had no idea what had prompted Daniel to say that to Sam.  None of his business, really.  He just wanted to collect Sam and get out without having to do or say anything that might mean anyone was giving up or even admitting the possibility of giving up.  “Captain.  ‘Gate’s just about up and running.  Time to get going while the getting’s good.  You hang in there, Daniel.  We’ll be back in a jiffy.”

Daniel, though, just couldn’t leave it at that.  “Guys, wait a minute.  There’s something I’d like to say to you.”

Oh no.  This meant trouble.  There was always trouble when someone felt the need to tell you they were going to say something before they actually said it.  He was tempted to tell Daniel to save it for later, but “later” was not something that was at all assured.  It never was, not really, but this time, Jack felt the truth of that very clearly.  He stood facing Daniel expectantly, Sam to one side of him and Teal’c on the other, just a bit further behind.

Daniel very slowly pushed himself up in the bed, the exertion obviously costing him a high price in pain.  His voice was soft and a bit scratchy, but that didn’t matter.  The words and their meaning were crystal clear.  “I just wanted to tell you what an honor it’s been serving with you.”  He lifted his hand, despite the tubes still taped to his arm, and executed a perfect military salute.  Leave it to Daniel, civilian though he was, to know the ways of the other and to speak their language fluently.  It didn’t even matter to Jack that he’d used his left hand; the right one was less than useless, so he’d made do with what he had.  As he’d always done.

Jack didn’t know what to say.  He didn’t know what to do either, other than just stand there.  He couldn’t leave without saying something.  That would be an offense of the worst kind possible.  Sam and Teal’c weren’t helping.  They seemed to be as lost for words as he was.

As usual, it was Daniel, the linguist, who found the words for them all.  “It’s okay.  You don’t have to say anything.  I know.  I can see it on your faces.  Just do me one last favor.  The next time I look at all of you, I want it to be tomorrow.  Before any of this ever happened.”

It went against everything Jack believed to leave anyone, especially a friend, alone when he was in pain.  He started to object, but Daniel didn’t let him do any more than take the breath before the first word.  Jack wasn’t even sure what that word would’ve been.  There was only Daniel speaking, saying the one word that was all that was needed among the four of them.  “Please.”

Jack couldn’t possibly refuse.  It didn’t matter what he wanted.  This was about what Daniel wanted.  It might just be the last thing Daniel ever asked of him.  He drew himself to attention and returned the salute.  Sam was doing the same beside him, and he knew without looking that Teal’c was bowing his head and crossing his arm over his chest in the Jaffa version of the same.  Jack couldn’t remember ever having so profoundly felt the meaning of such a deceptively simple gesture.

* * * * *

Sam barely registered the reason-shattering, brain-overloading rush of the trip through the wormhole back to P4J549.  All she could feel was the burning of tears freezing on her cheeks.  The last few moments with Daniel were searing her mind with an intensity that overpowered the light of the thousands of suns flashing past between ‘Gates.

She brushed the beads of ice away from her cheeks as they emerged on 549, then shifted over to autopilot.  It was the only way she could get through it.

She didn’t feel any sense of excitement or accomplishment when they located the tachyon decelerator, nor any sense of relief when they found what had to be the anchoring device.  There was no sense of wonder at the deceptively simple beauty of the objects as she carefully packed them into portable isolation chambers.  There was no emotion at all.  She couldn’t allow it right now.  If she did, it would rip her apart.

They went back through the Stargate, and she took the tachyon decelerator up to a lab outside of the Triangle.  She consulted McConnell’s translations of the notes on the schematic and carefully rigged the device with a timer, then returned it to the container.  They’d set it up at the last possible moment to minimize the risk of the decelerator disappearing before it had a chance to do its job.  Then she found an empty bunkroom and tried to sleep, but ended up staring at the wall.  She got up and wandered around the hallways, passing by Jack, who was doing the same thing.  They didn’t look at each other and didn’t say anything.

After finding one coffeepot that wasn’t completely empty and gagging down the last cup of hours old coffee, she made her way up to the surface, into the cool and expectant hush of the hour just before dawn.  Janet was there, smoking a cigarette.  She held out the crumpled pack, offering the last one to Sam.  It had been a very long time since she had smoked anything, since she was in college, but she accepted what was offered now without comment.  Janet held out a lighter, and Sam thought briefly about suggesting she give it to Nurse Clark, but then decided explaining the comment would take more words than she had to give right now.  She took the lighter and touched the flame to the end of the cigarette, inhaling deeply and savoring the burn in her lungs.  It was safe to feel that, but nothing more.

“He’s asked us to cease treatment,” Janet said softly, her voice sounding thin and insubstantial under the vastness of a sky beginning to pale with the touch of the sun.  Sam blinked, blew out a thin stream of smoke.  She wasn’t surprised.  How could she be after what he’d said to them before they’d gone back to 549?  “We’re still doing what we can to make him comfortable – medication for the pain and nausea, not that it’s helping very much at this point.  Clark’s looking after him.  I really wanted to do it myself, but he asked for her.  I guess it’s easier for him that way since he doesn’t know her all that well.  He doesn’t have to try and put on a brave face for her sake, although knowing him, I don’t doubt he’ll try.”  Her face twisted into a wry, pained smile.  “He gave me these.”  She held out a hand, Daniel’s glasses cradled in her palm.  “What am I supposed to do with these?”

Sam just stared for a moment, swallowing hard against the bitterness of cigarette smoke mixed with the stubborn aftertaste of coffee.  “Give them to Daniel.  The other Daniel.  That’s probably what he wants you to do.”

Janet nodded, blinking quickly.  Sam took one last drag on the cigarette and crushed the butt out with her heel, then turned and went back into the base, leaving Janet staring up at the last few stars fading out of the sky.

* * * * *

Sam found herself walking into the mess hall without even realizing where she was going.  The place was deserted, except for McConnell, staring off into space with his hands wrapped around a coffee mug.  She poured herself a cup of coffee, this time thankfully fresh, and sat down next to him, facing the same way, outwards, looking at nothing.  Neither one made any attempt to start a conversation.  What was there to talk about, after all?  They just sat, and stared, and took turns refilling one another’s cups.

Several cups later, Jack came in.  “It’s time,” was all he said.

They went to the lab and retrieved the two isolation chambers and took them down to the infirmary, back to the beginning, back to where it all started.  Full circle, in a manner of speaking.  It had really begun on 549, but this was where it had all gone so horribly wrong.

Teal’c and Janet were there already, along with Corelli and Sutherland.  Sam was a bit taken aback at the presence of the extra medical personnel, but then she realized they might not be extra at all considering the circumstances under which Daniel had first disappeared and the pain and disorientation he recalled experiencing when he reappeared.  That was also why Teal’c was here – to carry him out of the area if need be.  They’d have to go up the stairs – safer than the elevators right now – and Daniel might not be able to manage it on his own.  She hadn’t really thought beyond finding him and keeping him from being torn away from them again.  She hadn’t been thinking any more than absolutely necessary for the past several hours.  If she had, she would’ve understood before now what she still needed to do.

She glanced at the clock – 15 minutes and counting.  It only took a few of those minutes to remove the devices from their containers and to set up the tachyon decelerator.  She gave the anchoring device to Janet and demonstrated how to work the locking mechanism.  Then she set the timer on the decelerator and showed Jack where to trigger it.  They would have 10 minutes to clear the area and seal the blast doors once he’d activated it.  He didn’t even question why she was explaining this to him.

“I have to go,” she said.

“I know.”  Of course.  Jack, of all people, would know.  “Do him a favor, though.  Don’t look at him like that.  It’s all over now.  Believe that.  It’s going to be okay.”

She nodded and reached out to touch his arm, brief and fleeting.  Then she turned and left, the lump swelling in her throat until gravity pulled it down into her chest where it could grow even larger.  If this didn’t work, she’d be living with that awful, cancerous ache for the rest of her life.

* * * * *

Clark was just closing the door of Daniel’s room behind her as Sam entered the infirmary.  There was a bundle of sheets in her arms, rolled up such a way that Sam couldn’t see whatever had necessitated them to be changed.  She forced her eyes up to Clark’s face, sparing her only the briefest of glances, and Clark did her the kindness of simply nodding and moving quietly across the room to dispose of the linen.

Sam walked very slowly over to the door and pushed it open.  She felt disconnected from herself, like she was walking through a dream, terrified to open the door but compelled to look, to see, to know.

He was lying on his side, facing the door, knees drawn up and his good arm clutched across his stomach.  The bandaged arm was balanced along his side, across his hip, the muffled shape of the hand resting on his thigh.  Clark had apparently smoothed the sheets and blankets, but he was already making a start on kicking the covers back off again.  He was trembling, twitching, fighting so hard against the pain – and losing.  His eyes were squeezed shut, and his chin was pulled down to his chest.  He coughed, and flecks of blood stained the fresh pillowcase underneath his head, red blasphemy against the white.

The majority of the invading army of tubes and wires had been disconnected, and the monitors were pushed back against the wall.  Apart from the music, still playing, the only sound was the hitch and gasp of his breathing, a stark counterpoint to the liquid dreaming of the violins.

Her grandmother had been fond of saying that everyone comes into the world alone, and they go to meet their Maker alone, but every moment in between is to be treasured and shared, the bitter along with the sweet.  Daniel would not be alone, no matter what.  It was the least she could do.  It was everything.

She drew a deep breath, let it out carefully.  Death would not have to come here.  There was no need for death.  It was all over.  It had never happened.

He opened his eyes and looked at her.  She couldn’t look away any more than she’d been able to turn away from the door.  She had to see.  She had to know.  She had to do this for herself as much as for him.  There was so much pain there, so much suffering it almost overwhelmed humanity, but when he saw her there, a faint flicker of light crept back in at the edges.

The violins faded away.  She walked over to the bed and very gently smoothed the twisted edge of the blanket, then took a piece of gauze and wiped the blood away from where it had run out of the corner of his mouth and down his cheek.  She laid the back of her hand against his face – hot, so very, very hot – and said, “Just rest now.  I’m here.”  His eyes slid shut.

She turned to the stack of CDs sitting on the bedside table and sorted through the first few.  One caught her eye, the piercing gaze of an old man with long hair and a beard peering out at her from the cover – music for the cello, each piece dedicated to a poet.  She turned the case over, her eyes skimming down the list of titles.  There was one there for Kahlil Gibran.  The line of a poem came unbidden to her mind – _And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance._

She put the CD into the player, and the pure longing of strings poured out and washed over the room.  She sat down by the bed and took his trembling hand in hers, her fingers very gently brushing down his arm, over the livid bruises where the IVs and syringes had impaled him.  She lowered her lips to his palm and very softly kissed it, tasting salt, wishing it were possible to kiss away the pain.  If only it were that simple.  But nothing was simple now, not even death.

The shaking in his hand increased, and she looked up to see that he was shuddering with the kind of fragmented spasms that had ended with blood just moments before.  She reached over for some tissues, but was stopped by his voice gasping out, “No.  It’s all right.”  His eyes were open again, and there were tears in them, glittering with reflected lamplight and clinging precariously to his lashes.  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

It took her a moment to realize he meant the music.  He was weeping for that beauty and for its loss.  Maybe there were some things that were simple, uncomplicated, plain and true and having no need for adornment.  “Yes, it is.”  She almost reached out to brush away the tears, then stopped herself.  Sometimes, tears were a comfort.  Sometimes, they were all there was.

He shuddered again, more strongly this time, moaning and drawing his knees up closer to his chest.  A gasp wheezed out of him, two words – “Oh God.”  It was the first time, out of hundreds of times she had heard him utter that phrase, that she had ever considered it meant something more than just a simple exclamation.

She wanted so much to turn away, to get up, to leave.  She couldn’t stand it any longer.  She couldn’t hold it back.  The ache in her chest was choking her, and she couldn’t breathe.

“How much longer?”  he choked out. It was little more than a strangled whisper, hardly even sounding like a human voice.  He wasn’t looking at her, his eyes were squeezed tightly shut, but she couldn’t look away from him for even the few seconds it would take to look at her watch.  One minute or three or five – what difference did it make?  Sometimes there came a point when nothing was a comfort anymore.  Sometimes tears simply tore you apart.

“Soon, Daniel.  It’ll be over soon.”  That was all she could think of to say.  There was nothing left to do but let herself be torn apart.  She laid the side of her face against his hand, and wept hot tears – for love, for beauty, for loss – for the yet unformed future.  It could be changed.  It had to be possible.  Otherwise, what was the point of anything at all, most especially the tears?


	15. Doppelganger

His arm was numb.  Damn.  He must’ve fallen asleep at his desk.  Again.  What was it he’d been working on?  Translations?  Artifact cataloguing?

Daniel flexed his fingers, waiting for the pin-prickle sensation of circulation returning.  Instead, he got someone roughly jerking his arm up, followed by something cold and hard being slapped onto his wrist.  He tried to open his eyes to see what it was, but his eyelids resisted.  They felt like they were crusted with dried tears.

He could feel the firm grip of fingers on his other wrist, hands against his neck, coldness against his chest – first the touch of air, followed by something even colder pressed to the center of his chest.  Stethoscope?  Okay, definitely not in his office.  Must be the infirmary.

Scattered impressions flittered in and out of his awareness.  His senses seemed to be only partially functioning.  He could hear voices, but they were blended together, rolling one on top of the other; impossible to make out distinct words or individual speakers.  His tongue felt thick and unresponsive, but he could taste something vaguely metallic at the back of his mouth and bile in his throat.  The air he was inhaling was cold, but he couldn’t quite make out the scent tingeing it – definitely antiseptic, no surprise there, and… cigarette smoke?  He was about to try opening his eyes again, but someone forced the issue, peeling his eyelids back and flashing a painfully bright light into them.

“Hey!”  The protest was reflexive, and it took a few seconds for him to realize he was the one who’d said it.  He shielded his eyes with his hand and blinked several times while the world slowly came into soft focus, blurred just enough that he wasn’t quite sure at first what he was looking at.  His glasses were missing.  Damn.

“Daniel?”  That sounded like Janet.  Yes, there was a fuzzy face framed by reddish hair, at about the right height to be Janet.  Other faces clustered around him:  two right beside him – he had no idea who they might be; two a little further back, keeping their distance, hanging in the background – umm, Teal’c?  And beside him – Jack?

He tried moving his tongue again – still sluggish, but maybe he’d be able to use it to say something at least halfway intelligible.  The first sound that came out was half moan and half grunt, but then he managed to force his mouth around the sound of Janet’s name.

“Yes, Daniel, it’s me.  Do you know where you are?”

“Infirmary?”  Obviously – but it still came out as a question.  He didn’t feel like he could take anything for granted for some reason.

“Yes, that’s right.  Do you know what day it is?”

He paused.  “Monday.  I think.”  He didn’t get either a confirmation or a correction.  He squinted hard, trying to bring Janet into clearer focus.  “How long have I been out?”

Another pause.  “Four days,” she finally said.  “It’s Friday.”

“Oh.”  Almost a record for him.

“Do you think you can sit up?”

“Maybe.”  He felt a very bad headache lurking, but decided to give it a try anyway.  He made it about halfway up before the pain bloomed into a thick fog clogging his brain.  Hands supported him, helped him to sit up the rest of the way, and the pain receded.

“Here.”  She was handing him his glasses.  Oh, good.  That would make things a bit easier.  He slipped them onto his face one-handed and breathed a small sigh of relief.  Now he could see the expressions on the faces surrounding him quite clearly.  Happy, relieved, a bit stunned maybe.  Exhausted.  Definitely exhausted.  Like none of them had slept very well in days.  Had it been that bad?  He felt pretty much okay at the moment.

It finally registered that he was still wearing his fatigue pants, although the rest of his clothing had been removed.  No hospital gown.  That was… strange.  “What’s going on?”  Chilly air brushed over his bare shoulders, causing him to shiver slightly.

The question seemed to snap them out of their – whatever it was.  Shock?  Stupor?  Bewilderment?  Janet was apologizing about having to cut his shirt off of him.  That was silly.  It wasn’t his shirt.  It was U.S. government property.  Now she was apologizing for not having brought a replacement with her.  She hadn’t thought about it.

“Oh, for crying out loud.”  Jack took off his jacket and offered it to Daniel.  He started to thank Jack, but the words caught in his throat.  Jack looked like – well, he looked like he was about to cry.  Ridiculous.  He’d never seen Jack actually cry, so he had no idea what that would look like.  His imagination was running away with him, that was all.

“Daniel?”  Janet again.  He turned his head toward her, feeling like the fog that had been filling his skull was now wrapping around his entire body.  “We need to get you out of here.  Do you think you can walk?”

Okay, now this was going beyond strange.  It was downright bizarre.  Why on earth would they want to get him out of the infirmary?  Half a dozen additional questions leapt to the front of his mind, and a tumbling mob of other who’s and what’s and why’s were trying to crowd in behind.  He could sit here blathering, trying to ask ten questions at once, or he could attempt to sort them out while they moved him and take a stab at a coherent conversation once they got to… wherever it was they wanted him to go.  “Yeah, I think I can manage.”

He got one arm into the jacket, but he had to allow Janet to help him the rest of the way since his right arm didn’t seem to be waking up.  He still felt more than a bit off-kilter and light-headed, not to mention very disturbed by the undercurrents that were slipping just beneath the level of his understanding.  He let Janet and the blonde woman – Corelli, wasn’t it? – help him off the bed, and he didn’t protest when Teal’c and the other guy – Sutherland? – stationed themselves one on either side of him, lending support and pointing him in the right direction as they left the infirmary.  The cold concrete was more than a bit uncomfortable under his bare feet, but he didn’t complain.  He was getting the distinct feeling he should be grateful just to be alive.

* * * * *

All that was left of existence was the labored drawing of breath into lungs, the plodding thud of an exhausted heart, the agonizingly sweet voice of a cello, the warm touch of Sam’s hand and the bitter comfort of her presence – and the pain.  No amount of medication could stop it or even blunt it very much any more.  He hadn’t thought it was possible for someone to experience this much pain and still be conscious, much less alive.

But he was still alive, still aware, although he wanted nothing more at this moment than to let go of both awareness and life.  He’d heard it said that sometimes living can be much more difficult than dying, but now he knew that letting go was the most difficult decision of all.  Having Sam here with him made it a little easier, but it also made it nearly impossible.  At least the last thing he saw before dying would be the face of a friend, filled with warmth and compassion, her eyes wet from tears but still gentle and brave.

Something else flickered across those eyes – confusion?  She pulled away from the bed and sat up straight, turning back toward the door.  There was some noise out there, some commotion – voices, mostly muffled, but one calling out very clearly, “Doctor Jackson!”  Sam’s eyes snapped down to her watch, a rush of excitement lighting up her entire face but then being washed away by uncertainty and a mixture of denial and horror as she looked back at him.

He was back.  The other he.  The past he.  The time he remembered had passed.  It was the present now.  But he, himself, was still here.  _No._   That couldn’t be.  It wasn’t right.

It wasn’t fair.

It was cruelty beyond cruelty.  It was more than anyone should ever be asked to endure or be made to endure, with or without consent.  No one had ever asked him how much he was willing to suffer, and he wasn’t quite sure at the moment what his answer would’ve been if he’d been asked.  Would he face this for the sake of someone else?  He couldn’t even think of that other someone outside the door as himself.  It was another person entirely.  Someone who would go on living while he…  “I want to talk to him.”

All the life, emotion and color drained out of Sam’s face.  “Daniel…”

“Sam, I want to talk to him,” he said more firmly.

“We don’t know what we’re dealing with here, Daniel.  It might be dangerous.”

He just about strangled on a laugh and ended up spitting out a mouthful of blood onto the sheets.  He didn’t care who saw it now.  “I’m dying, Sam.  I’m going to die, very soon.  I can’t hide from that any more.  I don’t get to wake up like this was all a bad dream.  But he’s going to live.  I need to talk to him.  Ask him to come in here.  Please.”

* * * * *

Daniel swore the duty nurse looked like she was going to hug him as she stood up and yelled, “Doctor Jackson!”  Fortunately, the imminent toppling of the mound of paperwork on the table in front of her pulled her up short.  What was her name?  Clark?  He hardly knew the woman.  She’d only been assigned to the SGC a few weeks ago.  Okay, so add it to the list of strange goings-on.  At this point, he was sure he’d never remember all the questions he wanted to ask, much less be able to put more than maybe half of them into some coherent order.

So now he had four missing days; a strange object on his wrist that looked for all the world like a thick silver bracelet; being hurried out of the infirmary almost immediately after he woke up; glancing over his shoulder as he went out the door to see Jack fiddling with some sort of object disturbingly similar to the thing he had touched on 549; a good deal of the lower part of the base apparently evacuated judging from the fact that he hadn’t seen another soul on the way up here; having to take the stairs instead of the elevator for some unexplained reason; an ad hoc infirmary in a storage room; and everyone looking at him like he’d just come back from the dead.

He was fine.  In fact, he was feeling a bit better now than when he woke up.  The trip up several flights of stairs had left him a little shaky, the headache was flaring up again and his arm was still numb, but otherwise he felt pretty much intact.  Janet was insisting on checking him over, though, and he decided to let her have her way.  Experience had taught him that giving in to her was by far the most expedient means of getting out of the infirmary as quickly as possible.  It had gotten him out of the one downstairs.  Hopefully, it would get him out of this one too, posthaste.

He let Sutherland help him up onto a gurney and looked up in time to see Sam, emerging from an adjacent room and shutting the door behind her, although not before he caught a glimpse of a bed in there – an occupied bed, but all he could see was legs under a blanket.  Who was in there?  And why did Sam look so–  He didn’t quite know how to describe it.  It was like she was one step short of unraveling completely, just a hair’s breadth short of frantic.  And her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying.  For the person in the other room?

Jack hurried into the infirmary, caught sight of Sam and asked, “Is he gone?”  Sam just stood there with that shattered expression on her face for a few moments before she finally shook her head.

“What?!”  The normally cool and collected Janet Fraiser sounded like even she was beginning to fray around the edges.  “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know.”  Sam’s voice was shaking, barely controlled.  “It shouldn’t be possible at all.  Two different timelines shouldn’t be able to exist simultaneously in the same reality.”  She stopped and sniffed, looking up at the ceiling and wiping underneath her eyes.  “I mean, Narim told me we were heading in the wrong direction with quantum physics, but this–  This is crazy.  It can’t be happening.”

Everyone was silent, stunned, frozen in place.  What the hell was Sam talking about?

Okay, enough.  Time to start asking those questions.  But which one first?  “Would someone _please_ tell me what’s going on here?”  _Oh, that’s real good, Daniel.  Nice and vague.  And you already asked that one and got zilch for an answer._

The focus of every gaze in the room swiveled from Sam and turned toward him.  If he thought he had been getting a strange bunch of looks before…

* * * * *

So that’s what he looked like when he was rattled.  He wondered if his other self was enjoying seeing what he looked like after being dragged through hell and dropped off at death’s doorstep.  Probably not, judging from the way he was turning pale and a little bit green around the gills.  Maybe he’d even throw up.  Nice, normal vomit, though.  Not blood and little pieces of his stomach.

“I, uh–  They told me what happened.  God, I’m so sorry.”

He would have laughed, but he knew what the end result of that would be.  He didn’t think he could stand to have his own self trying to wipe up the blood with fumbling fingers.  He didn’t even want to be touched by this other… person.  He settled on sarcasm instead.  No wonder it was such a constant companion for Jack.  There was an odd kind of comfort to it.  “I know you talk to yourself, but don’t you think it’s more than a little strange to be apologizing to yourself?”

He didn’t seem to know what to make of that comment.  He changed the subject.  Predictable.  “I–  They told me not to touch you.  Some theory about contact between two versions of the same person resulting in the destruction of both or something like that.”

No.  He wouldn’t laugh.  What an absurd thing to say.  One of them was heading down the path of destruction no matter what.  And as for touching him–  He doubted there was any danger of that.  This other person looked like he was sickened by the very sight of him.  No wonder.  He could only imagine.  If he looked half as horrible as he felt, it would be enough to turn anyone’s stomach.  How had Sam managed to look at him with such tenderness in her eyes?

“They said you wanted to talk to me.  What can I do?  Anything.  Anything at all.”

He meant it, too.  He realized this other Daniel might also be seeing him as another person entirely, not another version of his own self.  A way of coping.  Damn him.  He didn’t want him to be able to cope.  He wanted him to feel it too – the pain, the suffering, the hopelessness.

He closed his eyes briefly.  Hate had never been an easy emotion for him.  He could never hold onto it for very long, but now it seemed to not want to let go of him, so very like the last remnants of life stubbornly clinging to him, refusing to let oblivion come.  He sighed, very shallowly, but it still rattled in his lungs.  He needed to say this, no matter what he was feeling. It was important. “I just wanted to tell you not to ever give up looking for Sha’re, and when you do find her… tell her I love her.”  It hurt, horribly, to say those words.  One more piece of his life being torn out of him – _his_ life, damn it.

“Of course.  You know I will.”

Yes, of course.  He would.  “You know, I finally understand how Harlan’s clones must’ve felt.”  He didn’t offer any further explanation.  At the time, he hadn’t quite grasped the sum of all the clones had been forced to give up.  Why should his other self understand now?  He was the same person.  Had been the same person.  But not any more.  His life was gone, given to this other person wearing his face and body.  It wasn’t his any longer.  He’d take it back if he could, but he couldn’t.  “You can leave now.  And don’t you dare look back.”

“I–  No, I won’t.  I’m sorry.”  And then, in a thoughtless moment of instinctive comfort, he reached out and laid his hand upon his hand.  And the world shattered, splintered apart into bloody shards of light and the shredding of memories.


	16. Shattered Mirrors

Janet didn’t like this.  Not one bit.  Every instinct as a doctor was telling her they were playing with fire here.  Apart from the possible psychological ramifications of seeing yourself in that condition in what had to be the mother of all out-of-body experiences, there was the disturbingly uncertain list of theories Sam had enumerated, ranging from instant insanity to complete obliteration of both parties.  It might be fatal for both of them, and then what had all of this been for?

Still, there was some part of her, something that had nothing to do with being a doctor, that knew it was right.  There really was no way they could refuse him his final request, any more than she could’ve willingly and knowingly put him out of his misery, even though every feeling part of her was bludgeoned by having to watch him suffer like that.

So now they waited.  Waited for one Daniel Jackson to say whatever it was he needed to say, and for the other Daniel Jackson to go on living for both of them.  The door was closed for privacy.  It was really no one else’s business what was going in that room.  It was between Daniel and… Daniel.

When she saw the flash of light in the space below the door and heard a crash and the sound of something hitting the wall – something large – it became her business again.  She was across the room and throwing the door open before anyone else even moved.

The bed was empty, the outline of a body rumpled into the sheets and dented into the pillow.  A fresh smear of blood was spattered across the pillowcase.  She froze.  He was gone.

She slowly turned toward the opposite wall, and…  Yes, thank God.  Slumped in the corner next to an overturned equipment cart – with a full head of hair, wearing someone else’s jacket, glasses askew over eyes that were blinking erratically – Daniel.  One Daniel.  Only one.  As there should be.

Sam was at the door now, holding onto sides of the doorframe with both hands, her chest heaving like she’d run a marathon even though she’d couldn’t have taken more than a dozen steps.  Other people were crowding up behind her.  “Is he–  Is he all right?”

Good question.  Pull yourself together, Janet.  You’ve got a job to do.  So do it.  “Okay, everybody out except for Corelli and Sutherland.  And tell Clark to get her butt in here, too.  Wait a minute–  Sam, here, take his glasses for me.  Thanks.  Daniel, can you hear me?  Daniel?”  No response apart from more blinking.  “Pulse is a little thready, respirations shallow but steady.  Probably shock.  It looks like he was thrown clear across the room.  He’s got a nice scalp laceration back here – must’ve hit the edge of the cart.  All right, let’s get him up on the bed, nice and gentle.  On my count – one, two, three.  Pupils equal and reactive.  Reflexes?  Good.  His blood pressure’s nice and steady.  Clark, get an IV going.”

For one disorienting moment, Janet felt like she had stepped back in time four days.  It was the most incredible rush of deja vu she’d ever experienced in her entire life, and it quite literally took her breath away.  Just for a moment, though.  Four days ago, stable readings had eluded them like fragments of dreams after waking up, but now, every vital sign was present and accounted for, all bang on.  The contrast just about shook her composure loose.

No time for falling apart now.  That would come later, hopefully from exhaustion and not from grief.  At least they had a fighting chance now.  They knew what they were dealing with.  Or at least, they had a much better idea than they had before. Every now and then, it didn’t hurt to go ahead and ask for that miracle.  Sometimes, someone heard; and sometimes, there was even an answer.

* * * * *

Sam hardly realized she’d just about broken Daniel’s glasses, she’d been clutching them so hard while waiting outside the door and listening to the staccato of Janet’s voice rapping out the orders, but when Janet finally emerged a short while later, it was with good news.  Daniel was suffering the symptoms of shock and had a laceration on the back of his head that would need a few stitches.  They would have to run some more tests, particularly to evaluate the extent of possible nerve damage in his arm.  He’d probably need some physical therapy.  He’d briefly lost consciousness due to a concussion from the head trauma, but now he was awake, if a bit groggy. More important than any of that, though, was that he was alive and he was stable.

Alive.  He was going to be all right.  Sam found she could believe that without having to fight past a lump in her throat.

The next several hours were busy to the point of being wildly out-of-hand, but later reflection told her it was probably emotion that made everything seem on the verge of defying gravity and flying right off the Earth.  Really, it was all fairly well under control.

Janet had her bring the scavenged MALP instrument package into Daniel’s room.  It confirmed the presence of tachyons in his body, with a concentration, as Sam had suspected, in his arm.  The anchoring device was doing its job, though.  He wasn’t going anywhere.  Not from the tachyons, and certainly not under his own power anytime soon.  Kind of difficult to get up and go anywhere when you were out cold, but Janet reassured her that he was only sleeping.  There was color in his face – normal color – and he was resting quietly, not making a sound apart from deep, even breathing.  Just looking at him, feeling the living warmth of his forehead as she brushed away a stray bit of hair, did wonders to reassure her.

While the rest of the personnel set about repopulating the evacuated portions of the base, successfully made safe once again by the blast from the tachyon decelerator, she and Janet secluded themselves in one of the labs to determine the proper dosages of energy from the decelerator to treat Daniel – just enough to neutralize the tachyons, but not so much there would be any permanent injury.  The side effects would likely be similar to those the other Daniel had suffered, but in a much milder form.  He would probably lose his hair – again.  Well, not really “again” from his perspective.  At least it would get the chance to grow back now.

It would be nice if they could make do with the anchoring device, but they had no idea what tachyons left in a living body would do over a long period of time, and there was no guarantee the device would continue to function.  Or it might come loose and fall off Daniel’s arm, and he’d most likely be lost again.  No, he would just have to get used to having short hair for a while.  Maybe he’d even end up liking it.

At the moment, Janet was triple-checking their conclusions on the radiation dosages, and Sam was off to see Daniel – finally awake and alert according to the latest in a steady stream of reports that had been coming to the lab while the infirmary was being relocated back to its original home.  She thought she’d get the jump on everyone for once and have a few minutes to talk to Daniel alone, but Jack and Teal’c had beat her there.  Then again, it was entirely possible Jack, and maybe Teal’c as well, had been there waiting when Daniel woke up.

“Hey,” she said, walking over to the bed and reflecting how great it felt to see smiles – genuine smiles, relieved smiles, glad-to-be-alive smiles.  Even Teal’c was joining in, in his subdued Jaffa way, and it didn’t look like he was exerting the least bit of effort to do so.  “How’s the patient doing?”

With a feigned glare at Daniel, Jack said, “Getting _im_ patient already.”

Daniel laughed softly.  “I’m doing fine, Sam.  Thanks for the get-well gift.”  He nodded at the anchoring device on his wrist.

“You’re welcome.  Oh, and Colonel Maybourne sends his best wishes for a speedy recovery.”

“Yeah, right,” Jack snorted.

“No, really, he did.  Well, actually, I think he phrased it more in terms of getting Daniel’s treatment over with as quickly as possible so he could get his hands on the technology.  As expected, it all goes to Area 51 after we’re done with it.  SG-7 has already been sent back to 549 to retrieve the tachyon generator.”

“Oh, great.  If we’re really lucky, Maybourne’ll figure out how to use the thing, and we’ll have him bouncing all over the space-time continuum.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that anytime soon, Colonel.  It’s going to take a tremendous amount of research before we sort out all the math behind this one.  And speaking of sorting things out, I just have to ask.  Daniel, what on earth did you do in there when you were… talking to yourself?  There was a flash of light, and when we went in to see what happened, there was just one of you.”

“Umm…”  He looked down sheepishly, fiddling with the positioning of his glasses on his nose.   “I, umm… Well, I touched him, okay?”  He gave a final shove to his glasses and added, “I had to. He was… Well… I had to.” Words failed him then, and he sighed in frustration as he held his hand out toward Jack, palm turned downwards, fingers curled in.

“What’s that for?” Jacked asked, eyeing the hand suspiciously.

“I thought you’d like to slap my hand,” Daniel replied matter-of-factly.  “It obviously had a mind of its own.”

Laughter bubbled up in Sam’s chest as she watched Jack try – and fail – to maintain a stern expression.  “Oh, I don’t think I need to do that,” he said, “but I might just check into requisitioning a straightjacket in olive drab.”

Daniel attempted – and also failed – to return an equally serious expression, and they all ended up smiling again, with some good-natured laughter mixed in.  God, that felt _so_ good.  And that reminded her…  She pulled a folded set of stapled papers from her jacket pocket.  “We’ve figured out a treatment regimen with the tachyon decelerator.  There’s a condition that goes along with it, though.”

“Why don’t I like the sound of that?” Daniel asked, rubbing absently at the bandage on the back of his head.

“Actually, I think you’ll like this condition.  You have to drink as much coffee as you possibly can.  Here,” she handed him the set of papers – a copy of a journal article.  “McConnell found that for you.  He said to tell you he’s looking forward to drinking you under the table.”

Daniel’s eyes skimmed over the top page.  “Is this for real?”

“Absolutely.”

“What?”  Jack was leaning forward, trying to get a look at the article.

“Uh-oh.”  Daniel flipped the article facedown on his chest.  “Somebody sound the intruder alert.  This man is obviously an imposter.  The real Jack O’Neill would never show that kind of interest in an article from a scientific journal.”

“Well, gee, I guess you really are feeling better.  So are you going to tell me what’s in the article, or do I have to wring your neck?”

Teal’c made a show of stepping in front of Daniel to protect him from Jack.  Daniel just laughed.  What a wonderful sound, better than any music.  “It’s a study showing that mice who were dosed with caffeine survived higher levels of radiation.”

“Well then, it’s a wonder you were ever affected to begin with,” Jack shot back.

That comment brought a sudden silence crashing down on them.  An image of Daniel, the other Daniel – bloodied, withered, shuddering with pain, dying – flashed in front of Sam’s eyes.  She had no doubt the rest of them were remembering some version of the same thing.

“Uh, guys,” Daniel said very quietly.  “Could I talk to Sam alone for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” Jack said as he patted Daniel on the shoulder.  “Teal’c and I’ll go round up some coffee, get you started off right.”  As he and Teal’c left, Sam heard Jack muttering that archeologists have all the luck and if it were him, Doc Fraiser would probably insist on giving him the caffeine with a huge needle.

When she turned back to Daniel, he was staring down at the article again, but she could tell he wasn’t really looking at it.  “Daniel?  What is it?”

“I just wanted to thank you.”  He looked up, and his eyes were so bright with pain that she thought for a moment she was looking at the other Daniel.  “For staying with me.  It meant more to me than you could possibly know.”

She felt her eyes going wide as the meaning of his statement registered.  “Daniel, do you–  Do you actually remember what happened to the other you?”

He looked down again and twisted the edges of the paper with the fingers of one hand.  The good hand.  But the other one would heal.  He would heal.  They all would.  As they always somehow managed to do.  More or less.  “Yes.  I remember all of it.”

Sam didn’t know what to say.  Her mind was reeling with the implications.

He started to ramble the way he did when he was uncomfortable talking about something.  “It’s like having two completely different memories of the same event, but both of them are equally valid.  They both happened.  Even what happened before all of this is – I don’t know, doubled somehow, like I have two matched sets of the same memories.”

Oh my God.  He remembered it all, every last bit, as if he had lived through it himself.  But he had _lived_ through it.  That was the important thing.  And he would live with it for the rest of his life, just like she would.  Like all of them would.

“Sam?”

“Yes, Daniel?”  She felt detached, distant, her thoughts being dragged into an explosion of tangled possibilities.

“What do you suppose happened to him?  The other Daniel?  Is he dead?”

The question raked across her rattled mind, shook it up even more.  She’d been elated their plan had actually worked, that they’d gotten Daniel back and he was going to be fine.  She didn’t want to think about divergent realities, other timelines, altered futures or pasts.  This was the only present that mattered to her.  “You say you have his memories.  That must mean your two ‘selves’ merged back into one.”  She said the words very slowly and deliberately, trying to will reality into them.

The distressed expression on Daniel’s face said he didn’t agree; couldn’t agree.  His hand was now clenched in a fist on top of the journal article in his lap.  “No.  I don’t quite know how to explain it, but I felt him being ripped away.  I know you warned me not to come into physical contact with him, but he was in so much pain.  It was an instinct, a – a reflex.  I didn’t even think.  But I know he… went somewhere else.  The question is, where?”

He blamed himself.  He didn’t have to say it.  She knew him all too well, and she also knew there was nothing she could say right now that would make him feel any better.  He would have to work through those feelings on his own, and then maybe he could talk to her or to Jack about it.  Then again, maybe not.  There was a lot of baggage he carried around – that they all carried around – that just didn’t fit into the framework of language.

She took refuge in a little of her own brand of rambling.  “The flash of light I mentioned – it was similar to what happened when you disappeared the first time.  I suppose it’s possible your touching him sent him somewhere or some _when_ else.  The contact might’ve pulled some of the tachyons out of you.”

He was silent for a long moment, his eyes focused downwards, on that fist, and she was beginning to regret adding scientific credence to what his instincts were telling him.  Then he looked up, and she could actually see in his eyes and in the lines of tension in his face that he was struggling to come to terms with this.  Or at least begin to.  He needed to talk it through.  As calmly and as rationally as he could.  He managed to say in a reasonably steady voice, “But I touched other people before he… disappeared.  You, Jack, Teal’c.  Janet, Corelli, Sutherland.  Why didn’t anything happen to any of you?”

“Well…”  She sighed, pulled up a chair, sat down, folded her hands in her lap.  She really didn’t want to think about this any more, but now she’d started, she couldn’t stop.  Usually, exploring these kinds of possibilities absolutely enthralled her.  Now, there was no excitement, no sense of discovery – just the ache of the last remnants of the truth being squeezed out of a heart she thought had been wrung dry already.  “You remember how only inorganic objects were disappearing in the lower levels of the complex?”  He nodded.  Damn it.  Those weren’t his memories.  But they were.  It was all his now, every last bit, the remembrance of every last dying breath.  “I came up with a theory that the tachyons were keyed to carbon chain molecules in organic objects.  It might’ve been even more specific than that, maybe keyed to a specific DNA sequence.  When you touched the generator, it could’ve sampled your DNA and keyed the tachyons to it.”

“And of course the other Daniel had the same DNA.”

“Yes.”  She couldn’t go any further down this road right now.  Maybe time would allow enough of a separation for her to be able to look at the entire bewildering chain of circumstances with something approaching objectivity.  For now, there was really only one more thing she could say, something from her heart as much as from her exhausted mind.  “He might not have made it through the transition again.  Even if he ended up somewhere else, he wouldn’t have lasted long.  That’s really all he wanted.  For it all to be over with, for there to be an end to the pain.”

Daniel was quiet for a moment, his head turned away from her, but then he looked at her again.  And she saw that same strange veil of tranquillity she had once seen in the other Daniel’s eyes.  “I know,” was all he said.  “I know.”


	17. Epilogue - Somewhere, Somewhen...

He didn’t have many memories from the time before–  He didn’t know “before what.”  He couldn’t remember.  No one was even sure how he got here.  They could only tell him that he was found, in the middle of a public park, at the edge of a pond, one spring morning after a storm.

He had been nearly dead.  He should’ve been dead.  He almost died several times while they struggled to heal him, but they managed to save him in the end.  They were stubborn, tenacious, strong-willed and absolutely unforgiving of failure.

They told him later, when his mind had grown strong enough again to hold onto more than just the last few moments of time, that he had suffered from a great wasting sickness caused by some kind of radiation.  Something they’d never seen before.  But they had seen a great many strange things and had uncovered the secrets of many of those things.  He was another challenge to them, and in time, he became a part of them.

It was nearly impossible to tell just from looking at him that he’d ever been so near to death.  If one knew what to look for, of course, the signs were there, and he suffered with the aftereffects for the rest of his life.  But there was something else that wasn’t quite right.

There had been places on his body where the tissue had died – on one arm, up his shoulder, onto his face.  The doctors had a talent for reconstructive surgery that was every bit as extraordinary as their skill in treating radiation sickness, but they didn’t know what he was supposed to look like.  He couldn’t really remember what he was supposed to look like, either, but he knew he wasn’t exactly the same as he was before.  Looking in the mirror was like looking at a stranger’s face.  The eyes were familiar, but everything else was… different.

The harder he tried to recall the time before, the more elusive the straggling bits of memory became.  There was only after, now.  The start of another life.  _Tabula rasa_.  Or almost, anyway.  There was a little bit of scribbling in the margins.

He knew the language of the people who had saved his life – knew it quite well, in fact, once he learned the subtle variations of phrasing and shadings of pronunciation – but he found he knew many languages.  He couldn’t be sure which one he had learned to speak first, but as time passed, he adopted the language of his rescuers as his own, as he adopted their customs.  The adjustment was not so difficult.  They had a common enemy, after all – the Goa’uld.  That he did remember.

Sometimes, fleeting glimpses of faces would come to him, but he couldn’t be sure if they were family or friends or even enemies.  All of that was gone, and it didn’t really matter where or how or why.  So he told himself, again and again, day after day, until he began to believe it.  Believing was the only way he could keep himself from going insane trying to reach out to memories that were always just beyond his grasp.

He knew for certain that he hated the Goa’uld.  That was all that mattered.  He dedicated his life to fighting them.  Everything he did from that time forward was in the service of that cause.

He learned from his newfound friends and colleagues, went down paths he instinctively knew he had never followed before – the ways of war and weapons and death.  And he became known by a name that came to him in a rare flash of memory – a small woman wearing a white jacket, with large eyes and auburn hair, insisting that this was his name, even though he knew it was something else.  There was the impression of being trapped in the wrong body, just as he now felt trapped in a body that wasn’t the same as it once had been.  It didn’t matter.  The remembered name was better than what his caregivers had been calling him – _Nominis Expers_ , the Nameless One, some saying it with pity for what he had endured and some with scorn for the weakness of his mind.  In the end, he proved beyond a doubt that he was made of fire and steel and brutal determination.

In the forest of thorns his life had become, he found a still and quiet place, a short span of time to share with a woman who reminded him of something he had lost in another lifetime.  He remembered laughing eyes and firelight and a warmth that had nothing to do with the fire.  In this woman’s eyes, the fire burned as well.  She had a bright spirit and a strong will, all bound together with an unrelenting hatred for the Goa’uld.  They found one another fleeing from the shattered ruins of a burned-out battlefield, and they joined their lives together for as long as they were able, until she was taken from him as well, and he was once more left with only the hatred and drive for revenge.

That was all he needed, all he would allow himself to need, until the day so many years later, after so many battles had been fought and lost and won that he couldn’t be sure whether there even was a war any more.  He had hidden himself away from the Goa’uld in an attempt to heal the injuries they had inflicted upon him.  He knew it was hopeless, but the years had made him stubborn to the point of obsession.  Ruthless.  He would not give up.

He wouldn’t have to.  Four travelers found his refuge, and the surveillance systems completed their preprogrammed task of reviving him from stasis.

He knew them.  Had known them.  His… friends.  But one of them was more than that.  One of them was – literally – himself.  As he had been.  As he could be again.  There was the face he hadn’t been able to recall, what he was supposed to look like – the eyes behind glasses, the nose, the mouth, the brownish blonde hair.  He was looking at himself – and instantly knew what he wanted more than anything else.  Another chance.  He was tired of the horrors and the killing and the blood.  He knew who he was, who he had been, who he might be again.  Machello was a lie, a name that never really belonged to him, a life that should have been something else.

He almost wept as the other man introduced himself.  His name.  Everything he had lost summed up into a handful of words.  He repeated the greeting, savoring the wonderful feel of the sounds on his tongue, familiar and yet strange after so many years.

“Hello, I’m Daniel Jackson from the planet Earth.”

* * * * *

The End


End file.
